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ibidem-Press, Stuttgart
In Memory of
Professor E. Richard Holmes (1946–2011)
Soldier, scholar, gentleman.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Tables
List of Diagrams
List of Maps
List of Images
Abbreviations and Glossary
1942
Excursions in Microhistory
An Aide-Mémoire: Reading Maps Like German soldiers
1. The Ogre of Rominten
2. The Conquest of Wilderness
3. Grossdeutschland
4. Bandenbekämpfung in the ‘Home Forces Area’
5. The Białowieźa Partisans
6. Population Engineering
7. Judenjagd
8. German Soldiers and Bandenbekämpfung
9. 1943
10. Göring’s Hunter Killers
11. Bandenjagd
12. 1944: Retreat
Conclusion: Memories of a Never Happened History
Epilogue
Appendix 1: German Ranks
Appendix 2: Luftwaffe Soldiers
Bibliography
About the Author
Acknowledgements
‘This is the smoking gun of all your research.’
Professor Richard Holmes, 18 February 2001.
On 3 February 2020, I met Heinrich Schreiber for the last time. My friend and neighbour was 97 and his faculties were rapidly decining through the lethal onset of dementia. In 1943, he was called up to the German Army, severely wounded at Smolensk in Soviet Russia, and was awarded the Allgemeines Sturmabzeichen (general assault badge). The memory of the badge remained his foremost achievement in a lifetime of struggles faced by so many working class people born before the war. Since 1970, I was fortunate to meet many Second World War veterans but Heinrich had taught me aspects of military culture barely studied by military historians. He discussed combat reports, the importance of signals and short-hand report writing. He could read and explain the meaning of reports and would explain the limits of his experience through his platoon, company and battalion. His division(s) had long since disappeared from memory. His only observation about the reports in this book, ‘so the Luftwaffe were also at it’. Perhaps a veiled reference to Nazi crimes, perhaps the universality of the military culture, or perhaps the memories of the east. From talking with Heinrich over ten years, I learned that working class German men went to war not much differently from those of other countries. The hardships of life continued after Hitler came to power, his family lost their farm tenancy when the rents were raised beyond their meagre means. Heinrich began work as a shoemaker, but his apprenticeship was interrupted by the war. After the war he became a stonemason. He passed away a month later, finally drawing to a close my contact with the war generation in Britain and Germany.
There were several key persons behind the completion of this book. The late Professor Brigadier E. Richard Holmes (1947–2011) was my doctoral supervisor. Our relationship began as professor-student, but then he turned mentor, and eventually became friends. During the research for my PhD, Richard saw the Luftwaffe records in this book and after reading my thesis summary said it was ‘the smoking-gun of my Bandenbekämpfung research.’ He recommended Birds of Prey should be a specific book and include the synthesis between the hunt and the military training. Richard’s colleague, Professor Chris Bellamy (Greenwich) was the second supervisor and he agreed with Richard that a chapter in the thesis should form the foundation for a subsequent book. Chris encouraged more research of the underlying violence between the Soviet partisans and the Germans to explain why Bandenbekämpfung was not anti-partisan warfare. Scholarly technicalities aside, studying under Richard and Chris was a dynamic experience. A special mention should also be made for Steph Muir, Richard’s assistant who was a constant pillar of support to all of us.
Beyond mentoring and friendship is another level of scholarly relationship that defies definition. During a meeting of the Anglo-German seminar group (1997–98), I met Dr. Nicholas Terry (University of Exeter). He was then a PhD candidate researching the German Army and we became immediate friends. Our friendship has spanned from the Goldhagen-Browning debates, the ‘clean Wehrmacht’ scandals, several conferences with publications and on into the Twenty-First Century. In 1998 we first discussed the content in the Luftwaffe files. He recommended presenting a paper at the Wiener Library event. While drafting my PhD thesis, Nick suggested signposting the role of the Luftwaffe in Bandenbekämpfung. Since 2006, Nick has been the constant advisor/mentor for this book and his was on his advice I decided upon the microhistory format.
There have also been a number of specialist advisors who have assisted me. Dr. Declan O’Reilly (London-KCL) has been a scholary conciliare and tough critic since 1998. My dear friend Dr Joe White, from the USHMM, was very supportive of my research. Following a visit to the UK, Joe recommended an article for the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Journal and introduced me to Dr. Michael Gelb (USHMM). Thanks to Michael’s editing the article was published in 2010. Joe passed away in 2016 and as did Dr Geoffry Megaggee four years later. Fond recollections of those ‘brown bag’ lunches and lively discussions about our research. During a visit to the BA-MA archive in Freiburg in 1998, I met and discussed the life of ordinary German soldiers with Professor Jochen Böhler (Jena University). This changed my perception of ordinary German soldiers. In 2009, Dr. Tomasz Samojlik (Mammal Research Institute, Białowieźa) kindly shared his ideas on the Polish history of the forest. Tomasz very kindly supplied the forest maps that led to the digitization process central to this book. At a critical time, Professor Beatrice Heusser (University of Glasgow) offered important supervisory advice on taking the research to the final manuscript. My life partner Bettina Wunderling BSc. was important to the research by formulating the application of GIS in the cartographical research. In the latter stages of completing this manuscript, Dr. Matthew Ford (University of Sussex) gave up considerable time on modern counterinsurgency, military innovation and concepts of education, including training. He also directly edited several chapters. I would like to also thank Dr. Olaf Bachmann (King’s College London) and Jake Halliday (Buckingham), for reading and commenting on the manuscript.
Since 1998 several academic institutions have been crucial to this project. Their help and support was particularly welcome since this project was self-funded. The Bundesarchiv (Germany), National Archives (London), Mammal Research Institute (Poland), National Archives and Records Administration (USA) provided unhindered access to records and advice. The RWTH-Bibliothek (Aachen), Staatsbibliothek (Aachen) and British Library (London) granted full access to holdings and inter-library loans. Germany has retained many of the traditional ideas open access learning for all and this deserves special mention in this book. The Internet Archive (Washington DC) granted unfettered access to all digitised sources, which was articularly helpful for older books outside the e-book systems. ESRI provided advice and guideance in the application of GIS software in 2010–12.
In fourteen years, many people have been involved in this book, for which I am eternally grateful: Special thanks are reserved for: Mike Buckley MA, Michael Birklein MA, Dr. Roger Cirillo (AUSA), Dr. Halik Kochanski, Dr. Bernd Lemke (Potsdam), Professor James Corum (Salford), Professor Dennis Showalter (†), Jörg Muth (Baltic Defence College), Professor Jesse Kauffmann (Eastern Michigan), Michael Birklein (RWTH-Aachen), Tomasz Frydel (Ottowa), Michael D. Miller, and Valerie Lange and Malisa Mahler from ibidem publishing house. In 2020, I joined the Twitter community and have received very supportive advice and guidance.
Finally, to family and friends. Whereas in a second book family and friends become part of a list, unusual to this story was the extended period of serious illness launched them into a strategic role. My parents, Pamela and Peter Blood, have always supported my work and career. Also to my relatives Jan, Lauren, Colin and Dr. Alexander Ford. My dearest friend for more than forty years, Manny Phelps passed away in 2015. After major surgery and disability, he devised the means to restore my writing that led to this book. We shared an interest in the Luftwaffe and I would hope this meets with his high standards of accuracy and detail. Manny’s family of Maria, Ricky, Danielle and Nicole remain precious to me. Dr. Barry Rosenthal (Baltimore) is a dear friend and supported this project with advanced computers. Harry Wise (London taxi driver) and Bradley J. Hodgson (gunsmith) spent hours explaining gun-making, drive-hunting, and that special relationship between rifles and marksmanship. All my friends mentioned in my first book were also part of the progress to this. Thank you to German doctors and medical staff who have worked incredibly hard in my interest over the last fourteen years.
List of Tables
Table 1: Bach-Zelewski’s travel itinerary
Table 2: fluctuations in manpower levels
Table 3: LWSB, death by shooting, 14 August 1942
Table 4: LWSB, death by hanging, 9 September 1942
Table 5: LWSB, hanging 22 September 1942
Table 6: LWSB, death by hanging, October 1942
Table 7: Forest communities and the results of deportation
Table 8: Settled out of the forest.
Table 9: LWSB, death by hanging, 22 December 1942
Table 10: executions through hanging, 20 November 1942
Table 11: LWSB, death by hanging, February 1943
Table 12: LWSB death sentences on 24 February 1943
Table 13: final deployment of the LWSB on 5 March 1943
Table 14: Herbst’s amended body count
Table 15: JSKB expenditures—fuel and ammunition
Table 16: JSKB roster, 6 March 1943
Table 17: JSKB muster March–October 1943
Table 18: LW Signals Regiment 1 schedule
Table 19: JSKB muster October 1943 to August 1944
List of Diagrams
Diagram 1: Reichsforstamt organisation and the Jagdamt (1936).
Diagram 2: the four categories of reported incidents
Diagram 3: age range of sixth company officers and NCOs
Diagram 4: age profile of sixth compan
Diagram 5: Original branch of Service with transfers
Diagram 6: Personnel assigned from Flak regiments
Diagram 7: LWSB/JSKB casualties
Diagram 8: cause of fatal wounds
List of Maps
Map 1: Poland divided, Nazi occupation zones in Poland, Soviet Russia and the Ukraine.
Map 2: Bezirk Bialystok circa 1944.
Digital Map 3: Luftwaffen Karte des Urwaldes Bialowies.
GIS Map 4: Police Battalion 322—the village deportations 25 July–15 August 1941
GIS Map 5: the Kobylinski deployment
GIS Map 6: LWSB strongpoints—6 August 1942
GIS Map 7: before the arrival of Fourth Company—10 October 1942
GIS Map 8: after the arrival of Fourth Company—2 November 1942
GIS Map 9: the arrival of Fifth and Sixth companies—19 November 1942
GIS Map 10: the positions of Soviet partisans killed by LWSB
GIS Map 11: deportations—comparison of summer 1941 and autumn/winter 1942
GIS Map 12: the total distribution of hideouts discovered by the LWSB
GIS Map 13: locations of Jews killed by the LWSB
GIS Map 14: The Final Deployment—5 March 1943
GIS Map 15: JSKB deployment—6 March 1943
GIS Map 16: Luftwaffe signals network and the German frontier 1943–1944
GIS Map 17: JSKB hunting patrols—March to October 1943
GIS Map 18: destruction of Jagdkommando Marteck
GIS Map 19: the Nönning Judenjagd
GIS Map 20: Unternehmen Vatertag—3 June 1943
GIS Map 21: JSKB second phase north/south final deployment
GIS Map 22: Plan for Unternehmen Paul, 28–29 May 1944
List of Images
Image 1: left to right, Oberforstmeister Walter Frevert Rominten, Göring in his capacity as Reichsjägermeister and Oberstjägermeister Ulrich Scherping.
Image 2: Senior Luftwaffe and state foresters in the lounge area in Rominten. A painting of a European Bison is hung on the far wall.
Image 3: European Bison in Białowieźa.
Image 4: Reichsmarschall Göring, Lw.Generalmajor Adolf Galland, Lw.Generaloberst Bruno Loerzer and Reichminister Albert Speer, August 1943.
Image 5: Bernd von Brauchitsch in his cell in Nuremberg prison 1946.
Image 6: Preparation for a diplomatic function at Rominten. Note the Nordic runes on the picture rail under the ceiling.
Image 7: Sites of memory—Located beside the railway in Zabłotczyzna (2 miles from Narewka), the memorial refers to approximately 500 Jews killed on 5 August 1941. The German records show 282 Jewish men were killed at that place on 15 August 1941.
Image 8: A German Army Ortskommandtur: issuing daily notices and labour assignments.
Image 9: Captured Soviet partisans after interrogation but before execution.
Image 10: Armed trusty and Nazi Collaborator.
Image 11: Białowieźa forest—partisan memorial in the conservation area.
Image 12: Civilian deportations and allocation to work or forced labour duties.
Image 13: Villages destroyed and cattle taken under the Nazi food plan.
Image 14: Luftwaffe troops in company order.
Image 15: Luftwaffe troops in action in the forest.
Image 16: Wounded Luftwaffe troops recovering in a military hospital.
Image 17: Typical strongpoint construction in wood.
Image 18: Reichsjägermeister Göring and his prize— Matador —the ceremony for the dead stag—22 September1942
Image 19: The signals was regarded as the advanced branch of the Luftwaffe. Recruits received a full training schedule equivalent to apprenticeships in industry.
Image 20: Sites of memory—Soviet military cemetery located within Hajnówka town. Engraving reads: Hero of the Soviet Union, Guards Junior Lieutenant Aleksii Vasilevich Florenko. Born 6 February 1922. He died in the fight to liberate Hajnówka region 25 July 1944.
Image 21: Sites of memory—located in the centre of Białowieźa town, the memorial stands on the site where public executions were conducted during the Nazi occupation.
Image 22: Sites of memory—located within the Narewka town limits, the Jewish cemetery survived the Nazi occupation.
Image 23: Sites of memory—located nearby Białowieźa town. They are memorials to the mass killings and destroyed villages in 1942. They stand in the grounds of the former German military cemetery, first constructed during the Imperial German Army occupation in 1915-18.
Image 24: In his position as General of Fighters, Adolf Galland approved and endorsed this anti-Semitic trope in comic form. The connections between hunting, the Luftwaffe and training had reached complete integration.
Image 25: Sites of memory—German dead relocated from Białowieźa cemetery. The search for Siegfried Adams burial place marked by my index finger.
Image 26: Heimatkriegsgebiet - Luftwaffe troops in training building small unit cohesion.
Image 27: Dress uniforms and other duties.
Image 28: The Luftwaffe troops assigned to the LWSB/JSKB were generally young and often reassigned from non-combat branches.
Abbreviations and Glossary
AA: Arolsen Archives, located at: https://collections.arolsen-archives.org/en/ search/
BArch: Bundesarchiv, including BA: Berlin (Lichterfelde); BAK: (Koblenz); BA MA: Bundesarchiv Militärarchiv, (Freiburg); BA-ZNS: Bundesarchiv-Zentralnachweisstelle (formerly in Aachen).
CMH: United States Army Center of Military History.
CP: command post.
DDSt: Deutsche Dienststelle (WASt), former Wehrmacht personnel archive.
FJK/FSK: Feldjägerkorps or Feldschützkorps, Nazi paramilitary forestry formations.
FMS: US Army Historical Branch, Foreign Military Studies (German army).
FSKAB: Forstschutzkommando-Abteilung Bialowies, the paramilitary forestry formations assigned to Białowieźa.
HSSPF: Höhere SS-Polizeiführer, regional or theatre SS and Police commander.
IMT: International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg.
IWM: Imperial War Museum, (London).
Jagen: a 1 kilometre square sector, a measurent to micro-manage trees and game reserves.
JSKB: Luftwaffe Jäger Sonderbataillon Bialowies zbV. (March 1943–August 1944).
Ln. : Luftwaffenachrichten, Luftwaffe signals.
Luftwaffe: German Air Force.
Lw.: Luftwaffe abbreviated for ranks and units.
LWSB: Luftwaffe Sonderbataillon Bialowies zbV. (July 1942–March 1943).
MGFA: Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Bundeswehr’s military history department since changed to ZMSBw, see below.
NARA: National Archive, College Park annex, Colombia Park Maryland, USA.
NCOs: German Unteroffiziere and non-commissioned officer ranks.
OP: observation post.
ORs: other ranks, non-commissioned military personnel.
PB: police battalion.
PoW: Prisoner(s) of War.
RFA: Reichsforstamt—Nazi ministry of state forestry.
Soltys: Lithuanian, refers to the local head person of a village.
SSPF: SS-Polizeiführer, district SS and Police commander.
TNA: The National Archives, formerly the Public Records Office (PRO), London
TsAMO Bestand 500 Findbuch 12452: Deutsch-Russisches Pojekt Zur Digitalisierung Deutscher Dokumente in Archiven Der Russischen Föderation (digitised captured German records). Located online at: https://wwii.germandocsinrussia.org/de/ nodes/ 2410-findbuch-12452-oberkommando-der-luftwaffe-okl
USHMM: United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum, Washington DC, USA.
Waffen-SS: militarised Schutzstaffeln, the military expansion from Hitler’s bodyguard detachment.
YVA: Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Centre, located at: https://documents.yadvashem.org
zbV: zur besonderen Verwendung, special duties or special deployment.
ZMSBw: Zentrum fur Militärgeschicte und Sozialwissenschaften der Bundeswehr.
1942
In January 1942 a popular German hunt magazine published a remarkable story about Luftwaffe Colonel Adolf Galland. During the German army’s attack on Moscow, in the winter of 1941, the famous fighter ace took time out to go hunting. He was an expert hunter, like so many Luftwaffe officers, and wanted to extend his record to the forests of the east. Galland together with his adjutant set off without an armed escort into a gloomy forest just north of Dünaberg (today Daugavpils in Latvia). The forest was renowned for its game but was badly scarred by war. The Soviet Red Army had put up a spirited defence, however the Germans forced them to retreat. The Russians had abandoned their trenches leaving behind the detritus of war; discarded equipment, clothing and weapons littered the forest floor. As the two hunters strolled deeper into the forest, they disturbed a herd of Roe deer. They decided to separate, and Galland took up a position in a bush by a clearing and a stream. Very soon he observed and shot a roebuck. The single shot wounded the buck and it sprinted away. Galland set off in pursuit but stumbled into a ditch breaking through ice immersing himself and coat in sticky mud. He sloshed around in the freezing muddy water trying to break free from its suction. By luck, his hunting rifle hadn’t got wet and continued the search as he followed a blood trail. Covered in sticky wet mud, Galland trudged deeper into the gloomy forest and eventually located the buck, it was dead. An impressive trophy, ‘I am overcome with joy! I did not expect such strong antlers.’ Galland put down his rifle, took up his hunter’s blade, and began preparing the carcass.
Suddenly, and without warning, Galland faced three armed Russians. ‘We were all surprised’ he exclaimed. Galland shouted ‘sstaj’, presumably meaning stop or halt, but a Russian fired at him. He took up his rifle and fired back, ‘one of the Russians clasped his chest and collapsed.’ Galland tried to shoot again but his rifle wasn’t loaded. He struggled to pull a bullet from his coat pocket, but it was snagged in sticky mud. Unable to gauge the Russians’ intentions, Galland opted to back off. He was temporarily forced to abandon his trophy later recalling, ‘only a hunter will understand how I felt!’ After a short time, he returned for his trophy: ‘I don’t think I will ever value a set of antlers more than those for which I had to fight with considerable luck.’ Galland penned his hunting tale, ‘in my shelter while being heavily bombarded by Russian artillery during the great offensive against Moscow that promises final victory’. He pondered the shortcomings of hunting in the ‘paradise of farmers and workers’ (contemptuous Nazi brogue for the Soviet Union), and that most wildlife had fled the forests as the front lines approached. The animals that remained had been exterminated rendering minimal hunting opportunities. To conclude his tale, Galland warned his fellow hunters and foresters to seek permission before hunting in the forests of the east: ‘A number of dangerous bandits are still roaming the large forest areas between the River Memel and Lake Peipus and will do for a long time to come.’ Galland’s parting shot was to assume his ‘report’ offered sound advice to those who recognise the value and the importance of German protective security in the east.1 Within a year, the random confrontations with partisans had turned into a major Soviet insurgency campaign.
On 1 December 1942, Adolf Hitler faced a military calamity. A week before, the Soviet Red Army had encircled Stalingrad, isolating the Sixth Army from adequate supplies or relief. Since the beginning of 1942, a raging Soviet insurgency had undermined all efforts to pacify the German occupied territories.2 The increased Soviet partisan penetrations had become a priority discussion for that evening’s military conference. Hitler introduced the Draft of Official Regulations for the struggle against banditry and explained:
The goal must be to destroy the bandits and restore peace and order. Otherwise, we will end up in the same situation that we had once in our domestic affairs, with the so-called self-defence clause. This clause led to the situation that no policeman or soldier actually dared to use his gun in Germany.3
The progress of Hitler’s policy, from proposal to directive to doctrine to dogma, had followed a predictable path. In late 1941, Hitler invited Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS and German police, to find a solution. In June 1942, Himmler initiated a planning process with particular instructions to his senior SS-Police officers. He demanded their proposals must include the vilification of the ‘partisan’ as an illegal ‘bandit’. Then from the proposals Hitler issued: Führer Directive No. 46, Richtlinien für die verstärkte Bekämpfung des Bandenunwesens im Osten (Instructions for Intensified Action against Banditry in the East) in August 1942.4 The policy was tried and tested under SS auspices, and in parallel, the chief of staff of the Army issued general instructions to form Jagdkommando (hunting-squads) to combat the ‘bandit bands’. All rear area forces were directed to exterminate the ‘bandits’ with the utmost ferocity. Also, cruel sanctions were imposed on civilians for assisting the bands, including execution or slave labour, their homes burned, and crops destroyed. The Bandenbekämpfung doctrine was officially introduced on 27 November but the doctrine’s architecture and language were already institutionalised by the summer of 1942.5
The Luftwaffe’s participation in Bandenbekämpfung was critical to security operations on the Eastern Front. In April 1942, the Luftwaffe committed ground forces and support units. At that stage, German security and counterinsurgency still conformed to the army’s regulations and tactical doctrines. From August, the SS became the guardians of Bandenbekämpfung dogma within all the Third Reich’s civil-military authorities, while the Wehrmacht gradually filtered the terminology into reports. On 31 December, the Luftwaffen Kommando Ost issued a report on the entire period since April. The report opened:
The increasing activities of the bandits since 1941/42 in the rear of Army Group Centre, presents a serious danger to the supply and the conduct of the war by the army and air force, or exploit or colonize local economies. Although large-scale operations and smaller actions to combat the bandits were conducted successfully by the security units, the bandit activity increased, especially in the frontline or area of the frontlines. This was aggravated by Red Army Frontlaufer, or stragglers, often supplied by the Red Air Force, and the bands’ press-ganged local people and trained them.6
The Soviets had organised raiding parties or bands of 200–400 men with specialists—scouts, messengers and saboteurs. These bands had constant and reliable communications with the Soviet Union, through signals, messengers and aircraft, which enabled re-supplies and reinforcements. These Red Army bands were properly organised and well armed, and ranged deep into occupied territory.7 The local populations were either directly assisting them or supplying food. The Germans were also disturbed that the band’s weapons were good quality and included mortars, anti-tank guns, and field artillery, and warned against underestimating the ‘bandits’.8
In response to the partisan threat the Luftwaffe had been forced to take ‘special measures’ to protect the airfields. Luftwaffen Kommando Ost recognised that the few security troops could not stem the advance of the bands. In response, on 24 April, Göring granted permission for the formation of Lw.Infantry Regiment Moskau from surplus manpower from tactical formations, building and construction units, as well as signallers and staff cadres. Training was shortened and the regiment was deployed in June. For a period, the regiment was the only available infantry in the entire area of Luftwaffen Kommando Ost and were committed to security tasks in sectors with high concentrations of partisan infiltrations. They were also briefly engaged in the frontline when circumstances demanded their commitment to conventional warfare. The ‘bandits’, according to the Luftwaffe’s colourful use of the emerging Lingua Franca, were committed to widespread Bandenanschlägen (acts of terror), with attacks on railways roads, stores, bridges, dairies, landed estates, warehouses, and kidnapping mayors (collaborators). The insurgency increased into Autumn 1942, which led the Germans to take more radical measures. The bands posed a serious threat to the occupation, the supply of the front and military communications. The Luftwaffe had facilitated a general replenishment of all its units, with increased training and reinforcements. The only limitations to the increases were inadequate shelters for the troops with the onset of winter. The army and Luftwaffe imposed similar mission targets of Befriedungsräume (entirely pacified area)—achieved through pacification, cleansing, and destruction. The Luftwaffen Kommando Ost report included a Butcher’s Bill: body counts with destroyed villages and lists of captured booty. The list of destruction included: 19 ‘bandit-camps’, 88 enemy villages, 140 bunkers destroyed, 1,284 partisans shot after capture, and lists of equipment. Subsequent research by James Corum uncovered the Lw. Infantry Regiment Moskau was responsible for the destruction of 5,000 houses and killed seventy-six hostages.9
Map 1: Poland divided, Nazi occupation zones in Poland, Soviet Russia and the Ukraine.
© J. Noakes & G.Pridham, Nazism 1919–1945 Volume 3, Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination, A Documentary Reader, University of Exeter Press, Exeter 1995, p. 1222, courtesy Liverpool University Press.
The report closed with a series of post-operational observations, which indicate that Göring’s lieutenants were not only experts in the application of security warfare, but were well versed in the politics of Bandenbekämpfung. The first observation concerned the local population vis-à-vis the Bandenlage (bandit situation): if the locals were peaceful, they were usually ‘happy’ to be protected by German troops; in bandenbeherrschten Gebieten (bandit-controlled areas) the locals work for the ‘bandits’; however, in the bandenverseuchten Gebieten (‘bandit’ diseased areas) the locals expected to be targeted by both sides. One comment concluded that local co-operation was necessary for the successful pacification and exploitation of an area, and it was therefore, critical to impose German rule. A second observation concerned the compromise of Nazi propaganda by security operations. It was recognised that burning villages for revenge or retribution might backfire, especially if the locals were both harmless and helpless. However, if an area was collaborating with the ‘bandits’ it was necessary to ‘cleanse with a firm hand.’ The third observation noted how the morale of the troops suffered when expected to combat the ‘bandits’ with inferior weapons. The bands were well supplied with superior and heavy weapons, and several times Luftwaffe flak artillery engaged in direct firing against heavily armed ‘bandits’. Another point mentioned the high level of mobility adopted by the ‘bandits’, which meant the Luftwaffe depended on the army’s security units to effect a mobile counter-strategy. A further observation criticised the absence of a unified command, and there had been reports of chaotic incidents. This had led to a centralisation of all Luftwaffe forces and the reorganisation of command structures. There had also been an introduction of strongpoints at important hubs along the railway lines, with Luftwaffe troops assigned to guarding junctions. A final point noted how the ‘bandits’ adopted ‘sneaky’ tactics, which required strong forces to counter and eradicate them. There was a palpable reluctance in a recommendation to conduct night-time actions and the troops to be trained to work in ‘night and fog’—the distasteful notion of resorting to ‘bandit’ tactics to counter the ‘bandits’. Operational training was acknowledged as the key to success and especially in learning to exploit the same methods as the ‘bandits’—the use of cunning, and ruthlessness.10
1 Adolf Galland, ‘Oberst Galland’, Wild und Hund, No. 47, 1941–42, pp. 357–358.
2 See Chris Bellamy, Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War, (London, 2007) and Evan Mawdsley, Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War 1941–1945, (London, 2016).
3 Helmut Heiber, David M. Glantz (ed), Hitler and his Generals: Military Conferences 1942–1945, (New York, 2002) pp. 14–17.
4 NARA, T175/140/2668141-355, Weisung Nr. 46: Richtlinien für die verstärkte Bekämpfung des Bandenunwesens im Osten, Der Führer, OKW/WFSt/Op. Nr. 002821/42g.K., Führerhauptquartier, 18 August 1942.
5 Philip W. Blood, Hitler’s Bandit Hunters: The SS and the Nazi Occupation of Europe, (Virginia, 2006), pp. 3–28.
6 TsAMO 500-12454-623, Bericht über die Bandenbekämpfung durch Einheiten der Luftwaffe im Bereich des Lw.Kdo.Ost von 10.4. bis 31.12.42, 8 Jan. 1943.
7 S.A. Kovpak, Our Partisan Course, (London, 1947). Stalin’s directive, 1 May 1942, instructed the bands to cause sabotage and destruction behind German lines.
8 TsAMO 500-12454-623, Bericht über die Bandenbekämpfung.
9 James Corum, “Die Luftwaffe und Kriegsverbrechen im Zweiten Weltkrieg.” in Gerd Überschär, Wolfram Wette (Hrs), Kriegsverbrechen im 20. Jahrhundert, (Festschrift für Manfred Messerschmidt), (Potsdam, 2001), p. 298.
10 TsAMO 500-623, Bericht über die Bandenbekämpfung.
Excursions in Microhistory
Writing history has history. The Luftwaffe’s participation in the Holocaust had always been on the fringe of history. Although Hitler’s air force was known to have held an instrumental part in the war, it was not associated with killing Jews, civilians, and partisans. The senior officers of the Luftwaffe tried to destroy the evidence in 1945 and very nearly succeeded. A small section of files survived that served as a catalyst for in-depth research of the Luftwaffe. The central thread of the narrative of this book is about ordinary Luftwaffe soldiers, the Landser and the Holocaust. The Landser is a slang word for the common soldier akin to the British Tommy. There was only partial evidence of the Landser’s footprint in the military documents. Consequently, painstaking research was adopted to piece together and collect scraps of evidence to construct a microhistory. From its origins in my PhD research, Birds of Prey was destined to be a microhistory. The research for this book, however, took a scientific path and applied historical GIS methods as forensic means to map the movements and the spatiality of the Landser. The outcome is this microhistory of Luftwaffe security troops in occupied Poland during the period 1942–44.
The general hypothesis underpinning this book re-confirmed my original research conclusions. Hitler’s Bandenbekämpfung was not conventional anti-partisan warfare or counterinsurgency. Bandenbekämpfung was not a bureaucratic reclassification of anti-partisan warfare without consequences, and the Wehrmacht was no longer able to conduct security operations within the parameters of its traditional guidelines. The application of Bandenbekämpfung was relatively easy and ideologically inexpensive. In practice, it vilified opponents, placed civilians under suspicion, and rendered them defenceless to exemplary punishment. Within its historiography, the school of military history has perpetuated the myth of Partisanenbekämpfung or anti-partisan warfare rather than recognise Bandenbekämpfung and its genocidal implications. This approach downplayed the place of Nazi ideology, as it sought to make sense of anti-partisan warfare. Given the evidence, this is no longer a sustainable argument. Bandenbekämpfung evolved from the forester’s battles with poachers and bandits. Christopher Hale makes a compelling argument that Bandenbekämpfung originated in the Thirty Years’ War. The word existed long before it was institionalised as a doctrine of militarised security in the Nineteenth Century. Bandenbekämpfung was radicalised as an operational doctrine within Imperial Germany’s colonizing security warfare, and was extended into the German way of war from 1908. Bandenbekämpfung was Germany’s approach to security warfare from 1942 onwards.1
The setting for the book’s research was Białowieźa forest in eastern Poland. This primaeval forest lies in the historical region of Podlasie and is famous as a habitat for the European bison. Białowieźa established a reputation for hunting and since the 1500s was a hunting reserve for the Polish kings. The forest and surrounding areas became populated with Poles, Lithuanians, Belorussians and Jews. There were few municipal conurbations, other than Bialystok, but many small towns, villages, and shtetls. The forest had a long history of authoritarian and violent occupation. After 1795, following the third partition of Poland, Białowieźa was subject to consecutive annexations: Prussia, Russia, Imperial Germany and then Nazi Germany in 1941. After 1918 this region once again returned to Poland, but war with Soviet Russia turned the region into one of the shattered lands of the east. After the experience of German Army occupation, during Great War, the Nazis increasingly craved the forest as a trophy. Hermann Göring pursued Hitler’s ambitions for Grossdeutschland (Greater German Reich) on the eastern frontier by locking Białowieźa forest into a defensive plan. This defensive plan envisaged a primaeval wilderness as a natural barrier to the threat of the ‘Bolshevik’ horde. In theory, this geopolitical strategy was scientifically sophisticated, but proved wholly naive as a defence line. This was Germany’s Maginot Line on the eastern frontier.
The research set out to explore how other ranks (ORs), or the rank and file, adapted to Bandenbekämpfung in Hitler’s race war. From 1942, the common soldiery perpetrated genocide in most theatres of the war: without overt ideological indoctrination; without being ordered by junior officers to commit crimes; and with everyday killing normalised to within military procedures or routines. There was no evidence the troops resisted this work. Indeed, trained into aggressive military concepts such as Auftragstaktik (mission-tactics) the soldiers were roused to heightened levels of violence.2 The research synthesized Göring’s geopolitical ambitions with the study of the Landser as perpetrators of genocide. In many ways this contradicted the general opinion that Göring disappeared into the shadows after Stalingrad. However, the findings set him apart from Hitler and Himmler. Whereas Hitler wanted to be excluded from the killing process, Himmler was a keen visitor to the extermination sites. Göring, in contrast, participated in the planning and willed its execution, but never visited the killing sites, or Białowieźa after the Nazi-occupation in June 1941.
My research focused upon Göring’s manipulation of two key institutions within his mandate as a Nazi leader. The German hunting fraternity and the Luftwaffe. Both institutions contained influential social elites and controlled a large proportion of the population. The hunt created the Nazified honour code for his ‘court etiquette’, and the Luftwaffe was the foundation of a ‘revolutionary’ military order. Together they merged the nstitutional symbolism of ‘The Blue’ (Luftwaffe) and ‘The Green’ (state forester-hunters). This was the culmination of Göring’s corporatism. By exploiting this institutional dynamic, Göring set about his plans for a permanent national frontier in the east. Stalin was determined to frustrate these plans and waged an intense insurgency campaign within Białowieźa. Göring escalated the conflict by sending Luftwaffe security troops to destroy the Soviet partisans. Jews fleeing to the forests to escape the Holocaust were caught in the middle and became victims of Göring’s hunter killers—the Landser. This microhistory was demarcated by three groups: Göring and the Nazi leaders plotting from the hunting lodges in East Prussia, the Luftwaffe soldiers on the ground hunting partisans and Jews, and the German hunt officials serving as the authoritarian lynchpin in the middle. Together, they all worked towards winning Hitler’s race war, but Göring had his own views how this should be achieved. This is a challenging book, but as close as possible it is a real-time reconstruction of Nazi-occupation of Białowieźa, German soldiers and the Holocaust. Michel Trouillot’s words are evocative: ‘This is a story within a story—so slippery at the edges that one wonders when and where it started and whether it will ever end.’3
The acquisition of sources
The research was hindered by the absence of a central repository of records and archives to anchor the book. The grouping of documents was like different corners of a jigsaw puzzle without an original picture to bring them together. There were mismatches between known actions, where histories had percolated into myths and no bridges to span any connection between maps and documents. My doctoral research into Bandenbekämpfung doctrine was helpful, as was defining Sicherheitskrieg (security warfare) as a traditional German response to armed resistance in occupied and colonial territories; but it was not yet clear how all of this applied to the Białowieźa case.4 There was a vague outline for a case study article, but too thin to stand alone as a book. Richard Holmes recommended I pursue my post-doctoral research along multiple lines of investigation. The primary sources from six key topics included: Hitler’s Luftwaffe, the hunt and environmental history, military geography, Colonialism and Nazi Lebensraum, the Holocaust, and the war in the east. Gradually, the evidence was acquired from a variety of sources, but with a common cut-off date of 1945. This evidence was then categorized into victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. Some postwar evidence that directly contributed to the narrative was included to explain how the perpetrators escaped justice and manufactured ‘new’ lives. This methodological approach of synthesising multi-disciplinary research satisfied some but generated criticism from others.
There was also a story about the Luftwaffe records. On 3 August 1945, US Army intelligence officers interrogated Karl Mittman, formerly deputy commander of the Historical Section of the Luftwaffe (8. Abteilung). Mittman, born in Frankfurt in 1896, had served in the Great War and afterwards had established a career as an industrial merchant. In 1935 he was called up and joined the Luftwaffe. His work had initially involved publishing a history of the war in the air 1914–1918. The onset of the Second World War suspended all previous work, as the section began collecting material for the present conflict. The section also expanded, employing well-educated officers with experience in writing historical narrative. Lw. Brigadier General Herhudt von Rohden (1899–1951) was placed in overall command. Section eight had six subsections: Auswertung (evaluation), Kriegsgeschichte (war history), Wehrwissenschaftliche Gruppe (military science), Bildgruppe (photographic section), Technische Gruppe (technical) and Archiv (archives). Mittman claimed the purpose of military history was to establish the basis for a world history, a medium for the education of service personnel, and to present ‘a responsible account to one’s own war.’ He identified three categories of military history: a political history of the war, a history of the military strategy of the war, and a ‘history for the education of the people.’ During the war, the section had completed a review of the period 1939–43; fifteen annuals of air war accounts including Poland, France et al; had compiled special instructional guides for officers; and had published pamphlets on aspects of the air war. All this work and output, according to Mittman, had been carried out without political controls or interference. Then, as the war drew to a close, the section made several moves from Berlin to Thuringia, Bavaria, and Czechoslovakia. Driving from Karlsbad to Bavaria, as allied thrusts quickened, Mittman decided to destroy the material. Fifty cases reached Vorderriss near Bad Toelz, mostly maps and material regarded as ‘little importance’, were stored in a forester’s office. Mittman helpfully offered tips to the allies how the archive could be reconstructed.5
More than fifty years later, I was in the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv in Freiburg-Im-Breisgau, the last day of a long research trip. Frau Noske, the resident but kindly official, presented a print-out of files that had just arrived in the reading room. They were a small collection of diaries of a Luftwaffe security battalion and a Luftwaffe ‘special commando’. They were assigned to security actions against Soviet partisans in ‘Bialowies’, the German spelling of Białowieźa, during 1942–44. The battalion was the Sicherungsbataillon der Luftwaffe Bialowies zbV. The battalion was raised on 18 July 1942, disbanded on 18 March 1943. The other formation was Jäger-Sonderkommando Bialowies der Luftwaffe zbV. This smaller unit was activated on 6 March 1943, but was increased to battalion size from October 1943, and remained in Białowieźa until the great German retreat in July 1944. It was immediately apparent they were an important source. Panic: hasty photocopy requests in bulk, hatched and dispatched, in the age before digitalisation. Subsequent deflation: under scrutiny, it was apparent that the primary content was locked in obscure map references. Richard Holmes recognized this was the ‘smoking gun’ of the research, but only so long as all the evidence was collected and deciphered.6 In lieu of managing the maps, a search process was started to locate the personnel records of the men. The Deutsche Dienststelle (WASt), in Berlin, held the Wehrmacht’s card index records. The Wehrmachtsauskunftstelle für Kriegsverluste und Kriegsgefangene (WASt) maintained a complete record of combatants, casualties, and POWs for all the Wehrmacht. Alongside the names extracted from the diaries with the casualty records, a prospective list was sent to the Bundesarchiv-Zentralnachweisstelle (BA-ZNS), previously in Korneliemünster, near Aachen, to locate records. That archive held several personnel files of some officers and ordinary ranks (ORs), including postwar claims for service pensions.
In their memoirs, Luftwaffe aviators have acknowledged the tactical implications of Bandenbekämpfung for the Luftwaffe’s ground forces. In particular, the change from the defence of installations to aggressive local search and destroy actions. Hans-Ulrich Rudel recalled his airfield being exposed to Red Army probes and no longer any ‘… battle-worthy ground forces screening our front …’. As ‘Ivan’ probed, the commander of the airfield staff company, ‘gets together a fighting company drawn from our ground personnel and those of the nearest units and holds the airfield.’ Rudel observed:
Our gallant mechanics spend their nights, turn and turn about manning trenches with rifles and hand grenades in their hands, and during the day return to their maintenance duties. … Our Luftwaffe soldiers at the beginning of the war certainly never saw themselves being used in this way.7
The question of the airfields in the ‘bloodlands’ had not entirely gone unnoticed. In July 1952, US Counter-Intelligence officials began an investigation of the Vinnytsia massacre, where Soviet secret police had murdered 9–11,000 Ukrainian civilians. The grave pits were discovered in 1943 and, the Germans used the evidence as a propaganda coup against the Soviet Union. The Nazi Ministry of Eastern Affairs assigned pathologists from nations across occupied Europe. Several former Luftwaffe personnel, present when the site was uncovered, were later interrogated by the Americans. Alfred Holstein (born December 1891), from Rothenburg, remembered visiting the excavations several times and recalled how the Ukrainian mayor (a Nazi collaborator) had called them victims of their religion. He was persuaded to give a detailed testimony, which revealed he was the commander of the Luftwaffe labour battalion working at the nearby airfield. Following a period of heavy rain and rapid drainage, the ground had formed strange shapes. In May 1943 they began digging and discovered the massacre site. Georg Müller (born 1894), had served with the Luftwaffe, was transferred to the airbase in Vinnytsia and testified:
At one time, I was going from Winia (sic) to the airport when I saw many people coming down the street accompanied by SS Guards. The people were Jews (men, old women and children). They were taken to the prison. A few days later, they were taken by truck to the place of execution (approximately one kilometre from the airport). They had to undress and walk into the pits which were already dug. There they were shot. There also partisans were disposed of in the same manner.
He also recalled engaging with a group of 60 Jews—slave labour working on the airfield. He discovered they were to be shot. A truck arrived that evening (6.00 pm) and took 10 to the place of execution—8 managed to escape. He was later transferred to a Luftwaffe facility in Lemberg, in Poland, and Müller learned of an execution site in the locality. The CIC report concluded: ‘no further investigation of subject massacre is intended by this detachment unless otherwise directed …’.8
In the 1950s, former German Army and Luftwaffe generals recast themselves as honourable professional soldiers, irrespective of being among Hitler’s cohorts.9 They were praised in military histories of the Luftwaffe, which persisted in focusing upon strategy, operations and technology; affirming a reputation for elitism, rather than scrutinising the allegiance to Hitler and its darker implications.10 Marrying murderous acts on the ground to knightly aerial warfare is not difficult to establish. The behaviour of the airborne forces in Crete (1941–42) continued a trail of crimes that began in the Spanish Civil War and included bombing civilian settlements in Soviet Russia and Yugoslavia on the spurious grounds of ‘suspected’ partisan hideouts. The Luftwaffe, as demonstrated in this book, was quite capable of breaching its legal codes to commit murder, even without the vilification of racial enemies.
Engaging with microhistory
This book was conceived at a particularly lively period of historical discourse and debate. The contemporary interpretation of Hitler’s war had begun to take shape in the 1980s. For example, Omer Bartov had noted, ‘The collaboration of the army with the Nazis and its role as the instrument which enabled Hitler to implement his policies, were most evident during the war against Russia.’11 Since German rearmament in the 1950s, the story of the Wehrmacht’s complicity in Nazi crimes had been resisted. Bartov’s book was an uncomfortable reminder of the reality of the war, just as the Cold War was about to end. By the 1990s the literature was directly questioning the mass mobilisation of manpower as directed towards the Holocaust. Christopher Browning had observed, ‘… the German attack on the Jews of Poland was not a gradual or incremental program stretched over a long period of time, but a veritable blitzkrieg, a massive offensive requiring the mobilization of large numbers of shock troops.’12 In Germany, the Wehrmachtausstellung opened in Hamburg, an exhibition that explained the Wehrmacht’s participation in Nazi crimes. A controversy over the content forced the exhibition to close and one of its organisers forced to step aside.13 Hannes Heer, having stepped down from the exhibition, published his interpretation of the crimes of the Wehrmacht on the eastern front and included his essay on combating partisans.14 In 2000, I was able to discuss my ideas with Heer and soon recognised we shared similar conclusions about Bandenbekämpfung, as a means to bringing ordinary soldiers to Holocaust killing without an overbearing ideological hierarchy.
The Holocaust was also embroiled in lively debates in the 1990s. For a long time, Raul Hilberg’s three-volume study framed Holocaust scholarship.15 Then Daniel Goldhagen exploded the accusation that Germans had been willing executioners, ‘… this book endeavours to place the perpetrators at the centre of the study of the Holocaust and to explain their actions.’ He argued the ‘… institutions of killing detailed the perpetrators’ actions, chronicled their deeds, and highlighted their general voluntarism, enthusiasm, and cruelty in performing their assigned self-appointed tasks.’16 Since 1940, deportations had collected Jews from across occupied Europe concentrated them in Polish ghettos. In June 1941, the SS-Einsatzgruppen ranged across the rear areas in the wake of the German Army’s advance into Soviet Russia.17 In the Holocaust by Bullets, the SS killed or murdered upwards of two million Jews.18 From mid-June 1942 the destruction of the ghettos set off another wave of deportations to killing centres, but this also sparked outbursts of Jewish resistance.19 By December 1942, Hitler’s war against the Jews had escalated into a three-part process involving deportations, killing centres, and mass deaths. The evidence collected for Birds of Prey confirmed that Luftwaffe troops were assigned to this process.
There were other challenges to collecting evidence. During the period 1941–44, Białowieźa forest came within Bezirk Bialystok, a Nazi occupation zone administered from East Prussia. Göring’s ambition was to bind East Prussia and Ukraine in a common frontier with Bezirk Bialystok—a land bridge between the two. This represented a racialized colonial frontier of fewere than 3 million Germans under Erich Koch, ruling over 35 million people (Ukrainians, Belarussians, Poles, and others). This particular region was under-researched, but for Christian Gerlach’s published doctoral thesis, which is cited in the narrative of this book.20 In Hitler’s Empire (2008), Mark Mazower referred only to Ukraine and noted that the SS had difficulties working with Koch, who became virtually untouchable after turning East Prussia into a pro-Nazi state.21 Koch could rely on both Hitler and Göring to back him during internal squabbles. The greater challenge to my research, however, was the glaring absence of evidence about Bezirk Bialystok in the archives.
Before applying Historical GIS (explained in chapter 1) to the research, several attempts were made to construct a more traditional historical structure for the manuscript. The classic study of a German town, under Nazi rule, was also considered a viable option because it was compact.22 There were parallels of cultures, anthropology and localism. Allen claimed his ‘microcosm studies’ were unrepresentative of the Nazi regime but encouraged detailed analysis, which initially made it an important option. The closely relevant study was Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men (1992), the study of a police battalion in the Holocaust.23 The book examined records from Federal German investigations, compiled from perpetrator interrogations and testimonials conducted more than twenty-five years after the war. Browning concluded the Nazis had unleashed a ‘blitzkrieg’ against the Jews, and ordinary men had carried out the killings. There were parallels of scale between police and Luftwaffe battalions, but whereas Browning could construct a case based on postwar testimonies, this was not available for a study of the Luftwaffe. Memory-based evidence has limitations, even with Federal investigations, but the greater problem was the lingering myth of the ‘clean Wehrmacht’, which included the Luftwaffe. Overcoming the myth was challenging.
The impact of the Historical GIS research is explained in detail in ‘Reading Maps Like German Soldiers’ (chapter 1), but it should be recognised that it was central to redirecting the research. The final microhistory version adapted for the book as a consequence of working with the GIS maps. Several scholars were identified as endorsing the benefits of microhistory long before its actual appearance as a specific methodology. Eric Hobsbawm defined ‘grassroots history, history from below or history of the common people’. This is referred to as Alltagsgeschichte by German historians or everyday history.24 Hosbawm’s Marxian interpretation of ‘history of the common people’ was a dialectic that might be applied to the history of the common soldier. In comparison to Hosbawm’s observations about the traditions of oral history to the working class, similar characteristics exist for the common soldier. The lowly soldier’s social structure was confined to a traditional militarised hierarchy, with orders from above forcing ‘confrontation or co-existence’ with officers and NCOs. To construct an interpretation of how the soldiery responded to Nazi dogma required a deeper understanding of the Wehrmacht beyond the battles and operations. This also involved an understanding of the cultural transformation from conventional combat to occupation, and vice versa, with some comprehension of how the soldiery survived the war beyond the usual glib interpretations of luck. Hosbawm’s ideas greatly suited the social history of the soldiery.
A wholly unexpected outcome from my research was the prominence of the German hunt in shaping events (on this see chapter 2). This coincided with a new study that advised: ‘military history, … is a promising candidate for … microhistory’, and later added ‘military history gives ample scope for the microhistorian.’25 This was a significant theoretical development, but there were no examples to support the claim. The application of microhistory in Holocaust history also illuminated how the intimate scrutiny of Nazi perpetrators could transcend everyday life and everyday killing.26 These microhistories seemed to fit the environmental and forestry conditions of Białowieźa. The conditions had formed a peculiar impression of Białowieźa on the Germans, which they dubbed Urwald Bialowies. The Mammal Institute (Białowieźa) had published several important publications, which have discussed life during the occupation.27 Historically, forestry and hunting have been dominant themes in German literature for centuries, while foreign observers have been rather whimsical about the national fixation with ‘gloomy forests’.28 The weight of forestry literature threatened to overwhelm the research for this book, but it should be recognised that the power of Białowieźa dominated the collective mindset of the Germans.29 Throughout the Luftwaffe war diaries, there were constant references to Urwald Bialowies, in almost an arena like context. Birds of Prey has attempted to reproduce that notion of an arena of killing, where the Germans imagined themselves as warriors of antiquity.
The hunting culture was politicised by Göring to serve as a code of honour, which enforced the operational dogma in Białowieźa. Senior hunt officials perpetrated genocide from their first orders for extermination, which continued for the duration of the occupation. The hunter’s mission was set by Göring, but their actions at the local level were defined by individual responsibility. Beatrice Heuser recommended pursuing a deeper examination of hunting and war through Barbara Ehrenreich’s Blood Rites.30 This ground-breaking interpretation of war and hunting led to further reading. In particular, Simon Harrison touched on much darker kinds of hunting and human behaviour in war.31 Under the Nazis, the German hunt turned into an elitist social class. One observation with hindsight, these findings could have been contextualized within Michel Foucault’s theories of power and discipline. An etiquette of power shaped the mannerisms of the hunters, especially in their relations to non-hunters. The hunt’s social elitism, in the absence of monarchy and aristocracy, was directed towards the ritualisation of professionalism. Foucault’s doctors and patients could be almost role-reversed into the hunters and non-hunters. These threads formed an image of the naked display of power and professionalism, as depicted in the symbolism of the ‘hunter-warrior’ of Luftwaffe propaganda, labouring with genocide, in the wilderness arena of Białowieźa.32
The necessity to conduct field research in Białowieźa came from reading Riding The Retreat. In the preface, Holmes discussed his ‘growing reservations with what we might term ‘arrows on maps’ military history’ and being drawn to the ‘microterrain, that tiny detail of ground and vegetation that means so much to men in battle.’33 Holmes had previously engaged with the history of memory through the anecdotes of soldiers. Both Firing Line (1985) and Dusty Warriors (2006) were influenced by memory, the ‘other soldier’ in the case of the former, and himself in the latter as an observer on the ground. Holmes listened to veterans after the Falklands War in 1983, but in 2005 gave an impression of being on the ground in Iraqi. This transformation in Holmes’ writing, from listener to witness, was a lesson in historical change, that went largely unnoticed in reviews. A further contemporary impression of the dichotomies of military culture came from The Junior Officers’ Reading Club (2010). The author warned the readers that incidents in war are not recalled in exact detail. Hennessey reflected upon a war from yet another standpoint of soldiers’ responses during a hostile occupation. There are always doubts over the accuracy of reports and this was more prominent in wartime where accounts were often accepted at face value.34 There was one important study that could not be incorporated into the research findings. Thomas Kühne has written extensively and profoundly about soldiers within the context of identity and comradeship.35 Repeated attempts to incorporate his ideas failed due to fundamental gaps in the evidence. This was primarily due to the lack of personal evidence of the Luftwaffe soldiers, their shortened periods of service together, and the absence of any identifiable primary groups. In the final version, it was a collective of Hosbawm, Holmes, and Hennessey that pointed the way. The consistent reference to documentary evidence, but the caution of the unreliability of the bureaucracy underpinning that evidence was a constant finding in my research.
At the heart of this book is the German soldier—the Landser—the common soldier. The motivation behind this book was to understand who they were and how they were—in effect, a socio-cultural military history. Scholars and writers have reflected on who they were, why they fought for Hitler, and remained faithful to the bitter end; but the soldiers themselves have remained aloof, distant, and impenetrable. During the war, British military intelligence examined German fighting traits through PoW interrogations.36 US Army intelligence carried the subject into a wider analysis of military methods and innovation.37 After the war, civil-military relations scholars applied the interrogation reports to a ‘cohesion and disintegration’ thesis (1947). The authors identified a ‘primary group’ concept, which claimed to hold the fighting or combat troops together. The article also cited an interrogation report of a captured German NCO about the political opinions of his men—the reply was instructive:
When you ask such a question, I realise well that you have no idea of what makes a soldier fight. The soldiers lie in their holes and are happy if they live through the next day. If we think at all, it’s about the end of the war and then home.38
The timeless words of veterans’ attitudes from all armies. The article was widely read but with a limited appeal. A general perception of the German soldier remained of the well trained and highly disciplined soldier. Nazism had socialised the soldiery, which tightly bound the myths of the Landser during the war. In the postwar age, Germans grappled with the uncomfortable realities of the war. In the 1950s, foreign observations, like that of The Scourge of the Swastika, were directed at German society struggling to come to terms with the war and Nazism.39 From the 1980s, scholarship began to follow an empirical/analytical path, while popular genres embellished uncontested German veterans’ anecdotes which has continued to this day.40 In 1983, a study compared the respective performances of the German Army and US Army during the war.41 Omer Bartov published his research of Hitler’s soldiers, which adapted the ‘primary group’ thesis to German fighting formations.42 I was fortunate to be placed in London at a time when several leading scholars discussed their ideas about common soldiers and war. Following a London University German history seminar in May 1997, there was a discussion with Bartov. He believed there was a shortfall of records, in particular the German NCOs, thereby reducing the prospect for serious research.43 In a subsequent conversation with Joanna Bourke, following a lecture at the Wiener Library, she argued men killing in war, stripped of military identity and political ideology, could be the basis for a comparative study.44 Bourke’s impressions closely matched the acts of men in Białowieźa. However, the resort to public killings by the Germans represented extreme exemplary violence, which placed them in a separate category of Second World War belligerents.45 This basic idea for comparative analysis, however, never entirely disappeared.
The Landser, as portrayed in this book, emerged from scholarly engagements with German colleagues. Following discussions with the late Professor Wilhem Diest and Professor Stig Förster at conferences, a different path of research was set emphasizing the interactions of social class.46 An impression drawn from conversations with German veterans about their impressions of ‘combat’, ‘fire-fights’, and their sense of gratification from memories of being soldiers.47 In lengthy discussions with Professor Jochen Böhler, about German soldiers and their private letters, a richer impression of the Landser emerged. The culmination of the research identified the Luftwaffe soldiers as either reservists (mostly officers with civilian professions) or conscripts (mostly ORs from the lower classes). The only professional soldiers were the senior NCOs (no more than six), and none of their papers has survived. If these men were judged by their careers, they cut a cross-section of Third Reich society: farmhands, industrial workers, clerks, low-skilled technicians, tradesmen, trainees, beat police, and junior civil servants. They were a rag-tag collection of men mustered into small units. They did not represent the cream of the crop, and even Göring held little sway over manpower selection at the point of recruitment. They were poorly organized and were turned into cannon-fodder—even the non de plume ‘the poor bloody infantry’ did not describe their circumstances. They were not particularly well-armed; their first weapons were captured enemy booty from the Great War. Neither unit colours and class identity, nor duty and discipline, explained their motivations. They performed occupation security as dedicated perpetrators, but then gave a reasonable account of themselves as German soldiers in retreat. The fog of war.
Terminology
Some issues remained unresolved. There was evidence of Polish collaboration with the Germans, especially in hunting and as forest guides. Identifying those persons was impossible as Germans reports did not include names. The problem of confused languages was an added complication. German soldiers, usually clerks in headquarters, compiled combat reports that struggled with Polish and Russian names. In Białowieźa, the occupation bureaucracy cast transliterations of Polish and Russian. Today, the only impact of this chaos is to cause confusion to researchers. An example: the Polish town of Hajnówka was translated by the Germans as Gainovka during the Great War, and Hainowka under the Nazis. The Germans translated Białowieźa as Bialowies in both world wars. Pruzhany in Belarus was Pruzhany when it came under Poland before 1939, and Pruzana under German occupation. The GIS maps adopted the German and narrative took the present-day Belarus form. The other prominent towns including Narewka, Topiło, Czolo, and Popielewo, Suchopol, Bialy Lasek, and Kamieniec-Litewski have remained unchanged. The Germans referred to Narewka Mala in their reports and that name is used throughtout the manuscript in accordance with the German records. Many villages disappeared and their names later replicated far beyond the original site. Others cannot be identified on any maps and the reader has to accept that some villages are now lost from record and memory.
Since the war, there have been several changes in the political boundaries of the region adding further confusion to place names. To identify such places, the original name is adopted, but in brackets the present name and nation: for example, Nassawen, East Prussia (Lessistoje: Kaliningrad Oblast). Any faults in translations are of course mine. Time was also a critical factor in this book, because a certain level of real-time has been restored to events. The 24 hours clock regulated military life, with the Luftwaffe reports adopting that time system, but which time zone were they working towards—Berlin or Moscow? The Białowieźa occupation was a confusion of time. The Germans imposed curfews between dusk and dawn, which the partisans and Jews ignored. Luftwaffe patrols rarely began before dawn or continued after dusk; the partisans attacked when there were no patrols. The atmospherics of darkness and lightness is better reflected by am/pm, which is adopted throughout the book.
In principle, the citations for the archival sources follow the original text. However, certain sources the shortand, the notes and the unclear dates led me to anglicize dates and document pages to ensure clarity. For example, this German citation include document number in the diary and the anglicized date: “BArch, RL 31/2, document 3, Wehrmacht-kommandantur Bialowies Tgb.Nr 686/42, An des Lw.Sicherung-Batl. z.b.V. Bialowies, 29 July 1942.” Words can have legal implications for academic research in Germany. In 1992, Christopher Browning accepted the restrictions of Federal German laws for data protection on the use of names of individuals. Those laws are still in force at the time of writing, and I also agreed to abide by the strict code of privacy. In an article about Białowieźa from 2010, I adopted pseudonyms.48 Since then, several German books have placed the names of many individuals that were assigned to serve in Białowieźa in the public domain. My research database is more extensive than those books, and so I adopted a mix of anonymity and openness. For those persons not yet published in the public domain and in the interests of anonymity, I have adopted the first name with the first letter of the surname followed by two **—for example, Rudolf F**. The names of men already published remain in full—for example, Walter Frevert. The ranks of those from criminal organisations, such as the Nazi Party and the SS, have been kept to the original.
1 Christopher Hale, Hitler’s Foreign Executioners: Europe’s Dirty Secret (Stroud, 2011).
2 Jeff Rutherford & Adrian E. Wettstein, The German Army on the Eastern Front, (Barnsley, 2018), p. 41. They refer to Auftragstaktik as ‘Mission Command’, a commander ordered a mission, arranged forces and set the goal but then left it to a junior officer or NCO to complete the mission as they saw fit.
3 Michel Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: The Power and Production of History, (Boston, 1997), p. 1.
4 Blood, Hitler’s Bandit Hunters, passim.
5 NARA, RG165 721A, Seventh Army Interrogation Center APO 758, Final Interrogation Report, Historical Section of the OKL, Ref. No. SAIC/FIR/51, 3 October 1945.
6 Philip W. Blood, ‘Bandenbekämpfung, Nazi occupation security in Eastern Europe and Soviet Russia, 1942–45,’ PhD diss. (unpublished), Cranfield University, 2001.
7 Hans-Ulrich Rudel, Stuka Pilot, (Exeter, 1952), p. 36.
8 NARA, RG319, Winiza (sic) massacres, September–October 1952, 66 Counter-Intelligence Corps Detachment, 17 October 1952.
9 Autorenkollektiv, Bilanz des Zweiten Weltkrieges – Erkenntnisse und Verpflichtungen für die Zukunft, (Oldenburg, 1953).
10 H. Boog, Die deutsche Luftwaffenführung 1935–1945, (Stuttgart, 1982); W. Murray (1996), The Luftwaffe 1933–45: Strategy for Defeat, (Washington DC, 1996); J.S. Corum, The Luftwaffe: Creating the Operational Air War, 1918–1940, (Kansas, 1997).
11 Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941–45, German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare, (New York, 1986), p. 3.
12 Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, (New York, 1998).
13 Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (Hg.), Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944, (Hamburg, 1995). Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (Hg.), Verbrechen Der Wehrmacht: Dimensionen Des Vernichtungskrieges 1941–1944, (Hamburg, 2002).
14 Hannes Heer, Tote Zonen: Die Deutsche Wehrmacht An Der Ostfront, (Hamburg, 1999).
15 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, (New York, 1985 revised).
16 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, (New York, 1996).
17 Yitzak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, Shmuel Spector, The Einsatzgruppen Report, (New York, 1989).
18 Father Patrick Desbois and Paul A. Shapiro, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 million Jews, (New York, 2009).
19 Shmuel Krakowski, The War of the Doomed: Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland, 1942–1944, (London, 1984).
20 Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland 1941 bis 1944, (Hamburg, 1999).
21 Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, (London, 2008), pp. 153–4.
22 William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1922–1945, (London, 1984).
23 Browning, Ordinary Men, passim.
24 Eric Hobsbawm, On History, (London, 1997), p. 201.
25 Sigurdur Gylfi Magnusson and István M. Szijártó, What is Microhistory? Theory and Practice, (London, 2013), p. 164 and p. 166.
26 Claire Zalc and Tal Buttmann (ed), Microhistories of the Holocaust, (New York, 2017).
27 Tomasz Samojlik, Conservation and Hunting: Białowieźa Forest in the Time of Kings, (Białowieźa, 2005), Bogumila Jedrzejewska and Jan M. Wójcik, Essays on Mammals of Białowieźa Forest, (Białowieźa, 2004); see also Jan Walencik, The Last Primeval Forest in Lowland Europe, (Białowieźa, 2010).
28 Simon Winder, Germania: A Personal History of Germans Ancient and Modern, (London, 2010), p. 17.
29 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, (New York, 1995), pp. 75–120.
30 Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, (London, 2011).
31 Simon Harrison, Dark Trophies: Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War, (New York, 2014).
32 See Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M.Sheridan Smith, (New York, 1994).
33 Richard Holmes, Riding The Retreat: Mons to the Marne—1914 Revisited, (London, 2007), p. ix.
34 Peter Hennessey, The Junior Officers’ Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars, (London, 2010).
35 Thomas Kühne, Kameradschaft: Die Soldaten des nationalsozialistischen Krieges und das 20. Jahrhundert, (Göttingen, 2006). See also Kühne, Belonging and Genocide. Hitler’s Community 1918–1945, (New Haven, 2010) and ‘Kameradschaft – “das Beste im Leben des Mannes”, Die deutschen Soldaten des Zweiten Weltkrieges in erfahrungs- und geschlechtergeschichtlicher Perspektive,’ Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22 (1996) S.504–529, and Kühne, The Rise and Fall of Comradeship: Hitler’s Soldiers, Mass Bonding and Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century, (Cambridge, 2017).
36 TNA, WO 208/3608 CSDIC SIR 1329, Establishment of a Jgdko by Secret order of the Befehlshaber Südost, interrogation of UFF’S Kotschy and Boscmeinen, 13 December 1944. WO 208/3979, A Study of German Military Training, Combined Services, May 1946.
37 TNA, WO 208/3000, ‘The German Squad In Combat, Military’, Intelligence Service, US War Department, Washington DC, 25 January 1943. WO 208/3230, US Army Pamphlet 20-231, ‘Combat in Russian Forests and Swamps’, Department of the Army, July 1951. Military Intelligence Service, No.15, The German Rifle Company, (Washington DC, 1942), 1942, partial translation of Ludwig Queckbörner, Die Schützen-Kompanie: Ein handbuch für den Dienstunterricht, (Berlin, 1939).
38 Edward A. Shils and Morris Janowitz, ‘Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II,’ The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Summer, 1948), pp. 280–315.
39 Lord Russell, of Liverpool, The Scourge of the Swastika, (London, 1954); Russell was a judge advocate officer and had worked on numerous war crimes trials.
40 For example, Max Hastings, Overlord, (London, 1986).
41 Martin van Creveld, Fighting Power: German and U.S. Army Performance 1939–1945, (London, 1983).
42 Bartov, Barbarisation, passim.
43 Institute of Historical Research: School of Advanced Study, University of London, German History seminar, Professor Omer Bartov, 21 May 1997.
44 The Wiener Holocaust Library, lecture ‘Intimate Killing’, 26 February 1999 presentation of Joanna Bourke, The Intimate History of Killing, (London, 1999).
45 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, (London, 1991).
46 Arbeitskreis Militärgeschichte e.V., Essen conference, August 1999.
47 In particular: Henry Metelmann (panzer—Guildford), Heinrich Schreiber (infantry-Aachen), Paul S** (Luftwaffe-Magdeburg), Frederich Baumann (infantry-Berlin) and Boso L**(Waffen-SS).
48 Philip W. Blood, ‘Securing Hitler’s Lebensraum: the Luftwaffe and the forest of Białowieźa 1942–4’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, (Oxford, 2010).
An Aide-Mémoire:
Reading Maps Like German soldiers
A.J.P. Taylor once wrote: ‘Every German frontier is artificial, therefore impermanent; that is the permanence of German geography.’1 The Luftwaffe’s mission in Białowieźa was part of a policy of erecting a permanent frontier on the eastern borderlands. Beyond this ‘new’ frontier lay Belorussia, Soviet Russia, and Ukraine, in effect Hitler’s Lebensraum empire. A permanent eastern frontier represented a geopolitical goal for the Nazis. Göring’s three-part plan to bring this about included racial population engineering in Białowieźa. The first and fundamental goal was to bring about the eradication of Eastern European Jewry. The second goal involved the reduction and deportation of Slavs, dubbed Untermensch (sub-humans), from the large group of forest settlements. In the third stage, Göring’s plan called for the settlement of ethnic Germans, mostly repatriated from the east. Hitler’s invasion of Soviet Russia complicated this plan, slicing through the former Pale of Settlement from Tsarist times, a vast territory that was still homeland to several millions of Jews.
The problem I had to overcome concerned the relationship between the Landser and the environment. How did 650 German soldiers effectively secure 256,000 hectares of Nazi-occupied Białowieźa? The command and control of space or terrain have always been a strategic concern of nations, colonisers, army commanders, and security forces. During the Iraq insurgency (2003–11), the American army was forced to adopt a ‘population-centric’ strategy.2 For this research, the first step was to recognise that the expansion of the Białowieźa Forest, by the Nazis, was the creation of a frontier security zone. I called this frontier security zone the Białowieźa arena, to reflect the full extent of Göring’s territorial ambitions in this region. This arena was secured on the basis of a ratio of one soldier per 1.52 square miles. How did the Germans fill the command and control of space, and was it effective? These questions challenged my research because they fundamentally alter our understanding of how Nazi occupation and colonisation was practised. In 2010, the research began the application of Historical GIS to solve these challenges and look afresh at how the Germans organised security. Consequently, this chapter is an aide-mémoire to the GIS maps that were generated and are included in full within the narrative.
I. The Nazis and military geography
Nazi aspirations were particularly focused on the frontier of East Prussia. Following an ultimatum to Lithuania, in March 1939, Memelland (today—Klaijpéda in Lithuania) was annexed, an area covering 3,000 square kilometres.3 After Memelland, there were more acquisitions of former Polish territory in the south-east, named Regierungsbezirk Zichenau. This added another 12,000 square kilometres. Further annexations increased the state’s landmass to 52,731 square kilometres (5,270,000 hectares), with a total population of 3,336,771. In July 1941, three forests became the anchors for further expansions. The Elchwald (Elk forest) designated Forstamt Tawellningken (due west of Tilsit and running north/south along the Kupisches Haff) was expanded to 100,000 hectares with localized annexations. The Kaiser’s former hunting estate at Rominten was increased to 200,000 hectares with Polish acquisitions. The third was Białowieźa forest, a trophy from the Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia in June 1941. Between 1915 and 1939, the approximate forest area was 160,000 hectares. Göring’s plan required an increase of 90,000 hectares, increasing the gross area of the forest to 256,000 hectares. One hectare is equivalent to Trafalgar Square (London) or the area of an American football stadium. Shenandoah National Park boasts 200,000 acres, which converts to 81,000 hectares. This brought the eastern forest plan to a gigantic total of 560,000 hectares. In forest mass alone, East Prussia’s 1933 borders had increased by twenty-five per cent.4 This occupation area, including Białowieźa, was designated Bezirk Bialystok and administered from Königsberg as domestic territory.
Where this expansionism was leading is not altogether clear, since Nazi dogma, strategic ambitions, and geopolitical annexations were all at odds. Erich Koch, as ruling Nazi Gauleiter of East Prussia, not only presided over all these expansions but was also gifted with the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Koch was turned into an overlord of a racialized colonial frontier. In effect, East Prussia and Bezirk Bialystok symbolised the fulfilment of the eastern frontier of the Greater German Reich—virtually replicating the brief existence of New East Prussia (1795–1806). The annexation of Ukraine, however, represented a fulfilment of Hitler’s Lebensraum ambitions. Thus, Bezirk Bialystok was also a geopolitical land bridge between Nazi Lebensraum and an Imperial style Greater German Reich. The creation of a colossal forest wilderness, dubbed an Urwald (primitive forest), also had strategic and cultural implications. There was a belief in the defensive military qualities of forest wilderness, which will be discussed later. Culturally, the creation of a massive forest pointed to the recreation of the ancient forests of Germania. In parallel, there were biological-zoological ambitions to recreate long-extinct animals, like the Aurochs that once roamed the ancient forests. In effect, Zoologists had institutionalised the notion of the racialized game. These mindsets lay behind the German occupation’ transformation of Białowieźa into a wilderness arena, however, even this story was loaded with contradictions.
In the military context, the expansion of the eastern frontier produced significant security administration requirements of a colonising scale, rather than for a political annexation. The challenge for the military-security services was to meet the Nazi goal. To excel in military geography was the German officers’ mantra. Field Marshall Schlieffen’s staff rides, his battlefield tours, were lessons in reading maps to better understand the nature of battle.5 Göring’s fitness for command could be partly gauged by his map skills and understanding of the terrain. In the first instance, he had acquired knowledge as a user of military geography. As an officer cadet, he was schooled in terrain and geography; as an airman-observer, he was an expert of map interpretation; and as a squadron leader conducted his command through maps—but was he suited to command-control Białowieźa from the comfort of Rominten? In the Second World War, German military cartographers not only plotted the movements of armies and the positions of enemies, but also the distribution of populations and strategic raw materials. The search and acquisition of local information were paramount to military and civilian occupations. Consequently, the daily production of maps was essential to both warfare and racial engineering. By 1942–43, it is estimated were that the armies in the east were printing and distributing upwards of 25,000 maps per day.6
German military geography was not well documented to assist this research,7 but an indication of the German cartographical system can be located in other sources. In July 1945, British Army intelligence interrogated a senior NCO from the Wehrmacht’s military geography branch. His interrogators isolated the German administration of military geography as the focus of their questions. They learned that Lieutenant General Gerlach-Hans Hemmerich (1879–1969) was reactivated in October 1936 as Chief of Abteilung für Kriegskarten- und Vermessungswesen, the Mapping and Surveying department within the Chief of Staff of the Army (OKH). He remained chief of army mapping until April 1945. The department was designated MIL-GEO, with its head office in Berlin and with smaller satellite departments dispersed throughout the army. Maps remained its primary mission throughout the war.8 Following the outbreak of war, MIL-GEO’s offices and personnel expanded through the conscription of elderly professors and civilians with geographical expertise. The Berlin university system was particularly important in providing staff. Professors also recommended good students for staff posts, and the army designated them Heeresbeamter, a military-civil service rank. This process of conscription was later extended to geography schoolteachers and local government surveyors. Following Germany’s early conquests, the MIL-GEO established outposts in most occupied cities. The scope of their work extended to gathering information recorded on a card index system. The breadth of data collected included physical geography, economics, water sources, traffic routes, roads, and anything deemed essential to military operations. Once compiled into maps and reports, they were packaged in comprehensive volumes and distributed to the higher commands as topographical intelligence. In effect, each high command of the army received a collection of detailed maps and cartographical information to conduct operations.
The British interrogators also raised questions about (Lw) Lieutenant Otto Schulz-Kampfhenkel (1910–1989), chief of the Forschungstaffel zbV des OKW. They learned that Schultz-Kampfhenkel was a geographer and was Göring’s special advisor on political-military geography. Before the war, he founded Forschungsgruppe-Schultz-Kampfhenkel, a consultancy with a reputation for applying a ‘total approach’ to explorations and surveys. He led an anthropological-cartographical expedition to Amazonia (1935–37) in a joint venture organised by the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Biologie and Brazil’s National Museum.9 The expedition’s mission was to examine Urwald and understand its special qualities. During the war, his Forschungstaffel was turned into a small office, attached to the OKW, and called Sonderkommando Dora.10 Schulz-Kampfhenkel was also tasked with exploring and surveying parts of North Africa. As the chief exponent of Urwald, Schultz-Kampfhenkel advocated the incorporation of forests into the German national defence system. While there was a sacred relationship between the German hunt and Urwald, Schulz-Kampfhenkel’s ideas for a forested border in the east gained a powerful grip on Nazi homeland security. Schulz-Kampfhenkel’s ‘hidden-hand’ was behind Göring’s plans for Białowieźa. In effect, the forest was set to become part of Germany’s national boundaries, and with a central strategic purpose of defence.
Map 2: Bezirk Bialystok circa 1944.
The area within the black box approximates to the Białowieźa security arena discussed in this book.
Source: Wikicommons|Public Domain
The Luftwaffe’s Białowieźa operation’s map the Karte des Urwaldes Bialowies is held by the Bundesarchiv-Militarärchiv. The map has a 1:100,000 scale and was produced in digital format of six sections. When put together they filled a small lecture room. The map had a legend that included the positions of troops, strongpoints, command posts, and wireless posts. During the war, the map was arranged as a single item on a large map-table in the Tsar’s former hunting palace, that served as the battalion’s headquarters. Trying to reconstruct the battalion’s cartographical activity was impossible: trying to locate the position of companies and squads beyond the major towns was a ‘hit and miss’ exercise. A conundrum materialized that came from not being able to integrate the map with the documents. The operational administration and orderly filing of the Luftwaffe combat reports contrasted with the content of the reports, that implied random, haphazard, and chaotic killing. Actions were too far at odds with reporting. The actions in the combat reports did not reflect the known understanding of the German way of war or small-unit actions. The maps were the primary form of command and control for German operations, and were pertinent to the Białowieźa story. Reports without the maps were largely incoherent beyond killing, fighting, or deporting. If the behaviour of the Germans was deliberate, it could only be proven by unlocking the map codes. A neutral, and important, issue within the documents, was the geographical references buried within the combat reports. These references could not be disputed. Attempting to reconstruct cartographical movements with this map approved impractical with marginal results. This confirmed Hobsbawm’s dictum that grassroots history has its challenges: it ‘doesn’t produce quick results, but requires elaborate, time-consuming and expensive processing.’11
II. The science of maps
The aphorism ‘a map is worth a thousand words’ was never more pertinent than in the research behind this book. The conversion to historical GIS (Geographical Information System) was a drawn-out process. Today, GIS is routinely applied to a full range of historical fields, including the Holocaust.12 Before that time, we relied on discussions with the geographers at the Bundesarchiv to try to understand how the maps were used. There was some confusion because there was no working reference to how the Germans had used the maps. In discussions with Bettina Wunderling, a qualified GIS technician, we examined the theory of applying alternative methods to unlock the maps and connect them to the war diary. We agreed upon an experiment that should use the digitized map of Karte des Urwaldes Bialowies as the platform for conducting GIS-based forensic analyses.13 Transferring the research to a scientific basis was not an entirely alien prospect. During my MBA at Aston Business School, assignments involved quantitative analysis of large data sets, computer programming, systems engineering, and design, and had devised a research method for managing large quantities of diverse information. There were hidden benefits that Richard Holmes recognised, that elements of my MBA, which included management systems, organisational theory, and social psychology, would help to broaden the historical research.
In the second decade of the Twenty-First Century, it might appear strange to discuss working with Historical GIS in a large area of Europe, without geo-referencing. The challenge was to combine old map skills with the new science of mapping. The first stage involved learning by doing. Initially, little could be done because the ‘Bialowies’ map lacked spatial coordinates and the projection was unknown. These are common problems when working with historical maps. As a consequence, it was not possible to use the map in a GIS system or make visualizations and analyses. We visited the Mammal Institute, in the UNESCO World Heritage park of Białowieźa in eastern Poland, and Dr. Tomasz Samojlik. He showed us the institute’s collection of historical maps and five highly detailed maps drafted in the 1920s by Polish geographers. After some preliminary examination, we realised the Germans had based their military map on the Polish maps. Tomasz provided the projections and coordinates to digitize these maps. In the search for comparative national/local maps from 1941, we found a consistent absence of borders between Białowieźa and East Prussia to the north, which indicated political annexation. A military map of the Pinsk-Pruzhany area to the south, drafted in July 1943, confirmed a national boundary towards the east. This confirmed the territorial expansion of East Prussia, as the national frontier with a wilderness bastion to the Greater German Reich in the east.14
Digital Map 3: Luftwaffen Karte des Urwaldes Bialowies.
© Bettina Wunderling.15
In 2009, it was virtually impossible to identify the lost villages and the scenes of many incidents in the forest. The preparations for being able to conduct forensic modelling came from comparing the documentary records to the application of historical GIS to research and using textbooks as guidebooks. There were few textbooks about GIS in historical research or how to apply GIS to forensic analysis. One of the few was published by ESRI Press, the in-house publishing arm of the leading GIS software company.16 The chapters were instructive. One chapter examined the importance of maps in GIS.17 The authors explained the values of reliability and accuracy in GIS modelling. They highlighted the visual impact of terrain. A second chapter focused on battlefields and detailed the essential processes from fieldwork to desktop mapping.18 Another important book confirmed the peculiarities of working with both historical data and maps.19A visit to Białowieźa was necessary to log important data into the database: the positions of old photographs, specific map references, and geo-reference points. The processing of the Luftwaffe map sections was a laborious and time-consuming task that involved adjusting different maps to a single useable map. Bettina began an advanced GIS course, and the department allowed the process of digitisation and the GIS mapping to be tested under university conditions. A high degree of expertise emerged that the university endorsed with a letter of commendation.20 Bettina began to incorporate more advanced methods of historical GIS.21To better understand the full breadth of Historical GIS and the basic operating principles, there were online seminars available to beginners. In May 2013, I joined an historical GIS course hosted by the Institute of Historical Research, London University. This involved working through an ArcGIS project in the classroom. This course reinforced the importance of managing several issues, including, digi-maps, geo-referencing, vector data and coordinates, symbolising data, pixelization, spatiality, data parcels, cartograms, and copyright.22 By the completion of the first stage and the preparatory work, we had produced a map (Map 3 below) in a digital, georeferenced form that would make possible a variety of analyses.
The second stage involved identifying data from the documents or qualitative content to form into specific layers. In a sense, this was akin to unpicking the spaghetti of data and trying to isolate common data sets. The significance of GIS is the integration of seemingly unrelated data and its reordering into meaningful information. Layers were identified from different sources. Infrastructure like roads, swamps, railways, roads, bridges, farms, and estates were digitized from the original Polish maps. The Luftwaffe had drawn information on their maps, such as the position of strongpoints, companies, and Jagdkommando. This data was integrated with the Polish maps and digitized. The next task involved data mining from the surviving diaries of the Luftwaffe. There were two defined periods with different commanders, tactics, and dogma. This was a very time-consuming process because of the form of handwriting. Sütterlin is not taught in German schools today, but was widely utilised during the war. Once the barrier of the handwriting was overcome, page by page, line by line, (about 120 pages) we were able to present the results for review by a German veteran, who explained more nuances about that writing form under combat conditions. The overall outcome was a wealth of details and data. This led to multiple complex layering and we began to compare colour pixelization against the black-white map format. We opted for the latter. There were so many map options we decided to compile a series of test maps. Copies of these maps were sent to the late Dr. Joe White and his team, at the US Holocaust Memorial and Museum in Washington DC in 2013 for an evaluation. We also began to examine the nature of time and its impact on the events. A partial experiment, involving multiple modelling was used to test the visualisation of progressive troop movement and patrols through segments of the forest. The outcome came down to tracking platoon, squad, and Jagdkommando movements, by minutes, hours, or days, depending upon the detail of supporting data.
Stage three involved formulating forensic analyses based upon the findings from the GIS layering tests. The key forensic mappings was classified under: the orders of battle or deployment of companies; the Bandenbekämpfung actions; population engineering; Judenjagd or Jew hunts; and larger operations. A 3-D model was drawn from the isolines of the maps. The outcomes of the analyses confirmed the working value of Historical GIS in a forensic dimension. How we presented and organized this evidence became crucial because the format selected would profile the narrative. The choices were: a military history format, the judgemental form of a war crime investigation, or a socio-cultural study of violence. In discussions about Bandenbekämpfung with retired US Army General Richard Trefry, comparisons emerged from Vietnam and Iraq.23 He recommended the US Army’s official report on My Lai as a structural model. The report incorporated a full schedule of maps and movement diagrams, which enabled comparisons with the logic behind the GIS mapping.24 Comparing post-war atrocities, such as My Lai, with Bandenbekämpfung was not the intention, but following the structure of the report of integrating maps in the narrative did seem appropriate. In 2013, a test of the mapping and narrative was made of the area where Siegfried Adams was killed in combat in June 1943 (see epilogue). The geo-data, geo-references, and qualitative content proved complete for Adams. The results were spectacularly successful.
A final test was to compare the findings to the content from Geographies of the Holocaust. This book had set the benchmark for applying historical GIS to the Holocaust. The book revealed the potential for a multidisciplinary approach to the Holocaust, but also the limitations when applied to military matters, and both are due to issues of spatiality. In a chapter about hunting Jews, the application of GIS was focused on time and space. The base data required a large body of data statistics including names, homes, mass deportations, and camps. In another chapter devoted to the killing grounds, the authors attempted to reconstruct the specialities of hunting Jews in Belarus. The chapter highlighted the formulation of ‘locational models of killing’, with GIS applied to map the movement patterns of killing units. There was graphical presentation of killings, a diagrammatic schedule of killings by time, and functional images of soldiery duties, which culminated in the summary—testimony, technology, and terrain. In both chapters there was an absence of integration and limited forensic outcomes. If the same methods had been applied to Białowieźa, they would have produced only minimal results.25 This did not reflect against the authors, but rather explained how different documentary evidence requires different historical GIS methods. We concluded that Historical GIS had unlocked the Luftwaffe’s mission and methods in Białowieźa. Historical GIS served three purposes: firstly, it had highlighted the prominent geographical features of the forest. Secondly, it recreated all military movements by timelines, operations, and outcomes, such as individual crimes. A deeper forensic analysis was achieved from mapping and visualising the effects of discipline, the routine, and orderliness of the killings. Thirdly, GIS exposed how a national political frontier divided responsibilities, but also explained the internal rivalries. In conclusion, GIS had exposed a grandiose Nazi scheme, Göring’s ambitions, and the soldiers’ behaviour—probably for the first time since 1945.
III. The GIS maps
This book contains more than twenty maps, the majority are from the Historical GIS analyses. The map below (uncaptioned) is an example of our first results. This is a composite map and although highly detailed it’s also a picture of information overload caused by the density of layering and grayscale. The ‘buffers’, or roundels, represent patrol distances within company areas and also radio signals ranges for small wireless devices. Arrow lines give general directions of patrols and deportations. The Germans incorporated the Jagen system, which represented a square kilometre ground—reflected in the grid pattern. This was an old Tsarist form of measurment used in Białowieźa for forestry management. The squares were mapped into the German maps and renamed Jagen. All of these factors have remained constant. However, in an effort to reduce the sense of clutter, we experimented with single layer maps and then with specific theme maps.
The solution we finally decided to accept were specific to the general findings from the research and forensic in design. The maps were finalised after series of experiments with colour, black and white, multiple layering, and single layer analysis. The GIS maps are in a specific set of representations: the orders of battle or deployment of companies (maps: 3, 4, 12, 13, 14, 20); the Bandenbekämpfung actions (6, 10, 16, 17); population engineering (5); Judenjagd (7,8,9, 11, 18); and larger operations (19, 21).
Alongside the GIS maps, the number of photographs were selected to contrast contemporary images of war with postwar memory. The aim was to visualize the concept of 'victims, bystanders and perpetrators' so prominent in Holocaust literature.
The conjunction of memory and mapping represents how communities co-exist within a landscape scarred by war and the Holocaust. Memories cast in the stone memorials stand in all Eastern European and Russian communities; this is an aspect of the Holocaust that is unique to the landscape. Maps and memories are germane to any microhistory of the region.26
1 A.J.P. Taylor, The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development of German History Since 1815, (London, 1961), p. 2.
2 Dan G. Cox and Thomas Bruscino (ed), Population-Centric Counterinsurgency: A False Idol? SAMS Monograph Series, CSIP, US Army CAC, (Kansas, 2011).
3 AŠarūnas Liekis, 1939: The Year That Changed Everything in Lithuania’s History, (Amsterdam, 2010), pp. 82–83; see also Norman Davies, Europe: A History, (London, 1996), p. 904.
4 Walter Frevert, ‘Zehn Jahre Jagdherr in Rominten’, Wild und Hund, (1943), pp. 148–153.
5 Robert T. Foley, Alfred von Schlieffen’s Military Writings, (London, 2003).
6 Discussions with archivists of the Bundesarchiv Militärarchiv. At the time of writing, there is uncertainty over the numbers of maps produced by the Wehrmacht.
7 Edward P.F Rose, Dierk Willig, ‘German Military Geologists and Geographers in World War II’, in Studies in Military Geography and Geology, 2004, pp. 199–214.
8 TNA, WO 208/3619, Interrogation Reports, CSDIC (UK), SIR 1706–1718, interrogation number 1709, German Army Warrant Officer Dr. Bartz 19 July 1945. He was described as a university geography lecturer, who returned to Germany after working in the USA and was conscripted into the army.
9 Sören Flachowsky und Holger Stoecker (Hg), Vom Amazona an die Ostfront. Der Expeditionsreisende und Geograph Otto Schulz-Kampfhenkel (1910–1989), (Köln, 2011).
10 Hermann Häusler, ‘Forschungsstaffel z.b.V. Eine Sondereinheit zur militärgeografischen Beurteilung des Geländes im 2. Weltkrieg.’ Schriftenreihe, MILGEO Institut für Militärisches Geowesen, Heft 21/2007.
11 Eric Hobsbawm, On History, (London, 1997), p. 201.
12 Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano (ed), Geographies of the Holocaust, (Bloomington, 2014). See also the essential secondary source was Ian N. Gregory and Paul S. Ell, Historical GIS: Technologies, Methodologies and Scholarship, (Cambridge, 2007); also, Anne Kelly Knowles (ed), Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History, (California, 2002).
13 Bettina Wunderling BSc. Geology (Göttingen), a certification in GIS (Kiel), and has studied at Aachen-RWTH. The GIS modelling was carried out with ARC GIS version 10.0 by ESRI Software.
14 Hein Klemann & Sergei Kudryashov, Occupied Economies: An Economic History of Nazi-Occupied Europe, 1939–1945, (London, 2012), plate 1.
15 This digital map represented the longest period of research and analysis prior to the full application of historical GIS.
16 Anne Kelly Knowles (ed), Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History, (Redland, 2002).
17 David Rumsey and Meredith Williams, ‘Historical Maps in GIS’, in Knowles (ed), ibid., pp. 1–18.
18 David W. Lowe, ‘Telling Civil War Battlefield Stories with GIS’, in Knowles (ed), ibid., pp. 51–63.
19 Ian N. Gregory and Paul S.Ell, Historical GIS: Technologies Methodologies and Scholarship, (Cambridge, 2007).
20 Geographisches Institut, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, May 2009–March 2010.
21 Jonathan Raper, Multidimensional Geographic Information Science, (London, 2000).
22 Institute of Historical Research, Historical Mapping and GIS, (research training), May 2013.
23 Association of the US Army, Annual Conference, October 2006.
24 US Army Colonel Roger Cirillo, PhD retired supplied a copy: ‘Report of the Department of the Army Review of the Preliminary Investigations into the My Lai Incident’, Volume 1: Report of the Investigation, 14 March 1970.
25 Alberto Giodano and Anna Holian, ‘Retracing the “Hunt for Jews”: A Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Arrests during the Holocaust in Italy’, and Waitman Wade Beorn and Knowles, ‘Killing on the Ground and in the Mind’ in Knowles et al, Geographies of the Holocaust, (Bloomington, 2014).
26 For an example of this, see the travelogue in Omer Bartov, Erased.
1. The Ogre of Rominten
Knuff was a crafty and cuddly stag as his name implied, but he was elderly, and his days numbered. Although this mighty stag had large antlers he was reduced to the status of a commoner. There were too many weak points in his vital statistics that denied him a place in the regal stock book. Regardless of Knuff’s less than noble pedigree, Hermann Göring had honoured the beast by selecting him for his hunting record. In his last hours, Knuff led Göring on a merry dance across der Romintener Heide. Göring stalked the stag for a week but the ‘old gentleman’ simply refused to surrender. For only the briefest moments Knuff tantalisingly presented his flanks but never long enough to be shot. After five hours of fruitless stalking in the morning, Göring was resigned to failure and trundled off to breakfast. Just about to tuck into a hearty platter, the mighty hunter received a telephone call from a forester that Knuff had been sighted. Leaving his continental breakfast behind, he dashed off eager for the kill. Göring mounted a shooting stand, took aim, and with a masterful shot he killed Knuff. This was the supreme moment—the sublime one-shot kill, a ‘… staggering phenomena that successful fighter pilots are good shots’, wrote Göring’s biographer.1 While anecdote has shaped the myths about Göring, the tale of Knuff represents a narrative about the hunt and the Luftwaffe lost from history.
Hermann Göring is a complicated character, with a façade that is not always reflected in the literature. In the past, his biographers have been compelled to condemn rather than delve beyond the superficial. In this literature, Göring is painted as the Nazi archetype of failure. This notion is also reflected in the balance of books on the man: mostly about Göring and the Luftwaffe; a few books about Göring and the Nazi economy; and a handful of books about Göring and forestry. Consequently, we know more than we need to know about his failings with the Luftwaffe but know less than is necessary to fully comprehend his part in the Holocaust. These depictions do not give us a rounded view of Göring. For example, in 1945 when examined by allied psychiatrists, he was regarded as the most intelligent and unscrupulous of the Nazi war criminals held in the Nuremberg cells. In the courtroom, he rallied from apathy to become the last champion of Nazism and the guardian of his legacy. To start at the end, therefore, would inevitably lead to the conclusion that he was a deviant, unscrupulous, clever, dogged by physical issues, had an addiction to morphine, but ultimately cheated the hangman with suicide.2
Deep within Göring’s psychology, was a story of violence that began with hunting and continued through soldiering. As a child, he was taught to hunt by his Jewish godfather on palatial estates. Then he was removed from this opulent lifestyle at an impressionable age and sent to a military academy with its strict discipline. Göring became an army officer and was posted to a Bavarian regiment garrisoned in Mulhouse in the Alsace, an area annexed after the Franco-Prussian war 1870/1. Göring experienced occupation first hand. He served in the disputed frontier area and was present in the region during the political unrest that led to the Zabern Affair (1913).3 In 1914 he served in the trenches and later transferred to become a pilot. Göring was a fighter ace, served in and then commanded the famous Richthofen Circus and was awarded the Pour Le Mérite. Although Göring politicised his war record, it was not until he came to power that it became the central core of a radical political-military idea. In November 1918, Göring gave the farewell address as commanding officer of the Richthofen Circus, he recalled their combat victories and casualties. Fourteen years later, as President of the Reichstag, Göring recalled saying Germany would once again be allowed to fly, and ‘I would be the Scharnhorst of the German air force.’ Gerhard von Scharnhorst (1755–1813) was the driving force behind the reforms of the Prussian Army. An interesting role model since Scharnhorst was known to be, ‘silent and withdrawn, a man who looked more like a schoolteacher than an officer of the king.’ His ‘calm tenacity in adversity’ was in stark contrast with Göring’s temperament.4 When the Great War ended, Göring was at the peak of his physicality, a war hero with attitude, but unemployment forced him to search for direction—he met Hitler in 1922.
Göring’s Nazi biographer called him the ‘Führer’s paladin’ and pitched the narrative to his master’s achievements in rebuilding the nation. He had come a long way from his squalid street battles in Munich after the war. ‘From hero to zero’, in modern parlance informs a trajectory of violence that culminated in a bullet wound during Hitler’s Munich putsch (1923). The wound changed his physical being and the rest of his life. Göring saw himself as broken like Germany. His mission to create a Greater German Reich was as much a reflection of his condition as it was his endorsement of Hitler’s ambitions. Göring’s Nazism was different to that of Himmler, Rosenberg and Goebbels because it had been born in pre-war nationalism and fuelled by the events of 1918–1923. His belief in a Nazi military revolution was wholly different to both the SS and the army. His ideas were grounded in his self-constructed Germanic-romanticized-renaissance, bound by honour codes, Nazi etiquette, privilege and patronage. Richard Overy has argued that as the leading Nazi defendant at the Nuremburg war crimes, he bullied, chided and coaxed his fellow inmates. His inflated self-importance, egomania and ebullience left little room for contrition. In 1939 the allied politicians had believed Göring to be a moderate but at Nuremburg he proved to be as extreme as the rest of Hitler’s circle. Overy believed Göring was an old-fashioned nationalist with a radical personality.5 In 1933, as Prime Minister of Prussia, Göring enforced police regulations to smash Germany’s left-wing movement. From 1933, under his guidance, the forestry and hunting fraternities examined future legislation and regulations, which led to the National Hunting Law (1934) and the National Nature Law (1935). These ecological laws were subtle devices that conformed to the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft and the evolving police state. In March 1935, Hitler agreed to the formation of an independent Luftwaffe, within the Wehrmacht following rearmament, and Göring was made its supreme commander. The forestry service would incubate the birth of the Luftwaffe.
Göring’s Nazism was motivated towards restoring German national honour, but his institutional ambitions reached deeper into Third Reich society. Peter Uiberall was Göring’s official interpreter during the Nuremburg trial, and claimed the prosecutors were unable to reach deep inside Göring. Uiberall argued that confronting Göring with crimes committed in the name of Nazi Germany was pointless. He labelled Göring a ‘Condottieri type of personality’ who didn’t recognize right or wrong or know the difference between good and bad. As far as Göring was concerned the nation was an organism, a ‘body politic’ that had to be secured and protected by any means.6 Göring the Condottiero is an enduring image of corruption, Machiavellianism, and capriciousness. He was an enigma of countless variations. The political ambition, to make Germany great again—a political tract with remarkable durability—fused his ideas across the breadth of Nazi orthodoxy. Shaping a modern military institution out of forestry, hunting and aviation, which combined the elements that were most Germanic in spirit to raise a frontier police with the capability to strike at enemies from long distance. This was a breath-taking strategic concept even by Nazi standards. Frontier security reinforced with a hard punch was fundamentally defensive, but also colonialist and nation-building. The killing of Knuff, therefore, can be seen as symbolic of Göring’s representations of Germany—past, present and future.
I. The Green
The social engineering underpinning Göring’s organisational ambition was both racial and hierarchical. The green uniform of the state foresters and game wardens drew on the symbol of centuries-old traditions from German culture. There was a bizarre compromise between Hitler’s anti-blood sport rhetoric and Göring’s bloodthirsty passions. Their compromise settled on the institutionalisation of völkisch culture throughout the Germanic forest and Germanic game. On 3 July 1934, Göring introduced the Gesetz zur Überleitung des Forst- und Jagdwesens auf das Reich (the bill for the National Laws for the Centralisation of the forests and hunting).7 On 1 April 1935, the Reichsjagdgesetz (National Hunting Law) was enacted and the Jagdamt (hunting department) was established as a department within the RFA.8 Diagram 1 is an organisational chart of the Reichsforstamt, highlighting the Reichsjagdamt Abteilung IV. The diagram was drawn from the military plans for the forestry industry and the hunting fraternity for mobilisation into the Luftwaffe in the event of war. The national hunt law centralised management, regulated hunt discipline, incorporated the preference for Urwald or primaeval habitats and introduced a scheme for the advancement of the Germanic game. The politics of the hunt involved corralling the power and influence of the predominantly middle-class fraternity and propagating Nazi racism through the hunt’s classifying culture of social Darwinism.
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Diagram 1: Reichsforstamt organisation and the Jagdamt (1936).
Compiled from multiple sources filed under NARA, RG242, T77/100/145/301, (OKW WiRu Amt) Reichsforstmeister.
The German hunt was liberalised through laws made in 1848. The laws stimulated middle-class hunting, a social-cultural phenomenon in Germany. This process of culturalization was accelerated by industrial innovation in advanced gun design and manufacturing, mass-produced accoutrements and the mass distribution of cheap popular hunt literature.9 During the Great War, hunting became a symbol of the inherent warrior masculinity of German soldiers. The collapse of monarchy caused an ideological void within the hierarchy of the hunt regardless of the increasing influence of the middle-class. The middle-class hunt was bereft of ideology because of the preponderance of a modus operandi steeped in professionalism. There was a great outpouring of hunt literature after 1848, but there had been no single volume codifying a general hunt etiquette until 1914.10 Raesfeld’s hunting manual was written from a professional standpoint and became the standard reference because he avoided dogma and didn’t offend anyone. Fritz Röhrig, a senior forester on the staff of Greifswald University, later published a cultural history of German hunting with an undisguised national-conservative bias.11 Like most from his profession, the first edition condemned völkisch myths of the Germanen tribes, Germania and the growing desire for ritual from within the hunt. A later edition incorporated a nuanced Nazi narrative. He argued the period immediately after 1848 had led to the endangerment of game, especially the extensive killing of elk, deer and beaver. This was coded language for maligning the middle-class as ‘trophy vultures’. Röhrig however, was hostile towards both dominant social groups of the hunt. He criticised the ‘privileged classes’ (aristocracy) for their irresponsibility in opening the estates to “guest-hunters”. He railed against the middle-class for transforming the hunt into a shooting exercise. The local shooting clubs and rifle associations were also a target of his ire. Röhrig claimed the hunt declined after 1919 partly caused by the alienation of the Jagdjunker (hunting aristocrats) and the vilification of foresters as royalist lackeys. Thus, between Raesfeld and Röhrig, there had been an observable politicisation of the hunt.
Röhrig’s ideological resentment was vented against the Communists with the accusation that they had machine-gunned game as symbols of capitalism. He attacked the societal craze for money where profiteering proliferated and endangered the lives of foresters with a sharp increase in murders. There had been an increase in poaching, and he blamed the complicity of ‘unsavoury characters’ like the Salonjäger (saloon hunters), Schiesser (shooters) or Fleischmacher (meat-makers). Röhrig criticised the ‘red’ press, satirical newspapers and Artfremde (aliens) for lampooning the hunt with cheap and vile satire. He generalised that all postwar periods, throughout history, were disastrous for hunting because unemployed former soldiers turned to poaching and banditry. Poachers had never been tolerated by the hunt. If arrested, the punishments were severe with the loss of an eye or hand, or public execution. His chapters took a racial dimension when he described how Hessen had regulated against Jewish traders by making them swear an oath to report any illegal trade in furs. In Prussia, Jewish traders were forced to purchase certificates to trade furs.12 Röhrig accused Weimar politicians of hypocrisy, patronising the hunt’s feudalism and participating in private hunts, but ridiculing the hunt in parliament. The rising values of wood, forced Weimar governments to improve the lot of state foresters. This brought about improved training and schooling, but the social emphasis had shifted away from the hunt. The decline in the domestic game forced hunters to seek alternatives overseas, in safaris and hunting dangerous game in primaeval habitats.13 Writing after the Nazis were in power, Röhrig congratulated Hitler. He was grateful for the eradication of the “red” menace. The Nazis were the saviours of Germany and Göring had protected both the forest and game. Röhrig called Göring’s 1935 hunting law a “monument in his own lifetime” widening the national and classless appeal of the hunt and realising the goal of harmony with the Volksgemeinschaft.14
Göring as chief of forestry and master of the hunt was responsible for an institution of diverse talents. The first Generalforstmeister of the Reichsforstamt (RFA) was Dr. Walter von Keudell (1884–1973), a long serving Prussian civil servant. He was removed from office in 1937 because he refused to implement Göring’s policy for cutting quotas. He was replaced by Friedrich Alpers (1901–1944), who had studied law at Heidelberg University and became a committed Nazi in 1929. Alpers took an honorary SS officer rank and in 1941 worked on the infamous hunger plan that led to the starvation of millions of people in the east. The Jagdamt (the hunt bureau) was organised as a department within the RFA. The chief of the Jagdamt was Oberjägermeister Ulrich Scherping (1889–1958) who was accountable to Keudell and later Alpers, but in practice reported directly to Göring. Scherping was the architect behind the hunting law and was deeply committed to the process of Nazification. He was born in Pomerania and began a career in the army as a cavalry officer, and like Göring was an early devotee of hunting. During the Great War, his bravery was rewarded and was promoted to the general staff of an infantry division. In August 1915, Scherping arrived in Białowieźa and was left awestruck at the magnitude of the forest. After the war, he joined Freikorps Rossbach at the same time as Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s first deputy.15 Scherping took up a career as a professional hunter and a staff writer for Der Heger (a hunt journal). In 1927, he became general manager of the Deutsche Jagdkammer (German Chamber of Hunting) an organization founded in 1920 and a year later the Reichsjagdbund (National Hunting Union). He gained a reputation as the hunt’s leading political activist and the exponent of right-wing dogma. In 1934 he acquired the title Oberstjägermeister (Colonel of the Hunt) and became Ministerial director of the Jagdamt. The adoption of Oberstjägermeister with its royalist resonance, a rank placed seventh in importance among the two thousand positions in the Kaiser’s royal household, made him a target for lampooning from Nazi rivals of which there were many.16 Scherping clung to Göring in all matters of policy, politics and rivalries, but was astute enough to cosy up to Himmler and serve on his SS personal staff.17
Aldo Leopold, the American naturalist, visited Germany in 1935. He made observations of Göring’s reforms at work and visited Silesia to meet Günther-Hubertus Freiherr von Reibnitz, the Gaujägermeister or Regional Director, with his assistants the Kreisjägermeisters. The meeting was held in a local police station where Reibnitz’s offices were located, which reflected the future of German forestry and the Nazi police state, but Leopold did not report on anti-Semitism.18 Scherping was responsible for the Aryanisation of the hunt. In 1935 the hunt acquired self-policing powers that allowed the implementation of an Aryanised membership base. In 1937 he announced, ‘the hunt had become a closed shop to outsiders and had restored its noble reputation’, and then added that ‘the law had removed anti-social elements that gave hunters a bad name’—he meant the Jews.19 Rules were drafted to define those persons excluded from the hunt as ‘foreigners without German nationality’, which also meant Jews.20 In The Nazi Seizure of Power, Allen discovered that all the local shooting associations were quick to discriminate against Jews, cancelling their memberships once the Nazis came to power.21 Then Nazi hatred for the Jews exploded into violence on 9–10 November 1938, during Reichskristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), which led to the arrest of more than 30,000 Jews and more than ninety killed. A few days after the violence subsided Göring hosted a conference of state officials at the Reich Air Ministry. He joked the ‘Jews could be restricted to forest areas inhabited by elk, which, like Jews, were marked by their large, crooked noses.’22 The tragic culmination of Nazi race policies was the assistance given by the RFA in East Prussia to supply timber for the construction of the Stutthof concentration camp in 1941.23
Long before the Nazis came to power, the hunt had departed from the natural science classifications of the renaissance to the rigid social Darwinism of the Nineteenth Century.24 In post-colonial Weimar Germany, the hunt spun fantastical and exotic accounts of the ancient and extinct game. Under the Nazis, the recreation of the Germanic game became part of a racialised zoology, game and habitat research. The science of hunting began to follow many research trajectories. In 1936 Göring founded an institute of hunting science in Hannover, which later transferred to the University of Göttingen. The Heck brothers, Lutz (1892–1983), and Heinz (1894–1982) had also been experimenting with their breeding back programme to restore the long-extinct Aurochs. Their work involved the mass observation of European cattle breeds to isolate what they believed was the special characteristics of the Aurochs. The first breeding experiments led to a breakthrough in 1934 when they sired a bull later called ‘Heck cattle’. Lutz declared the research funded by Göring was the greatest value to science and a ‘the symbol of German power and courage.’ From 1938 Rominten’s game population was re-engineered. Wild boar and five Heck Cattle were released under Göring’s orders. Eventually, five lynxes were released, the precise number recommended for game management purposes.25 Leopold described the prevailing conditions of the hunt in Germany, ‘Every acre of forestland in Germany, whether state or privately owned, is cropped for game.’26 He blamed this on the German obsession for hunting deer, which outweighed the damage herds caused the habitat. He believed there would be long-term consequences, especially among game birds. He was deeply critical of foresters who ‘sprinkled’ hardwood trees among pine forests to achieve mixed forests but were unable to create a balance in-game management.27 Leopold and other foreign either overlooked or ignored the prevailing Nazi racialism—both the game stock and the people were being Aryanised.
The long-term implications of decisions to the national ecology were a constant theme of discussion. Leopold learned of the German appreciation for predators in preventing the degeneration of game, and the status of the wolf as the noble animal of the wilderness. Decades later he claimed this idea for himself.28 However, not all predators and aggressive game were appreciated. A postwar rumour circulated that Göring had a morbid fear of snakes. His senior hunter disclosed this secret to explain Göring’s absence from hunting in wild forests and his preference for high stands. During a visit to Darss, a nature protection park, Göring was shocked and petrified to learn it was the habitat for poisonous Adders. An unnamed forester informed Göring that hedgehogs killed snakes. He immediately called Lutz Heck and ordered 300 hedgehogs brought to Darss. He was persuaded there was no veracity in the story that hedgehogs killed snakes. Göring immediately departed from Darss never to return.29 If Göring had a morbid fear of snakes, it represents an important insight about his fears, but also points to his enthusiasm for eradicating all Jews as vermin.
In 1938 Lutz Heck was promoted chief of nature protection and natural monuments within the RFA.30 He set about a building programme of national parks and game reservations. Heck wanted the people to observe native animals and the habitat to comprehend how the Nazi culture social Darwinism functioned to the greater benefit of German society. Mass public education through micro-models of game habitats was conceived as a means to concentrate the people’s ‘organic gaze’ on the biological values of everyday existence. These early forms of bio-zone were predicted to elevate social Darwinism as the normal natural order of life. Heck believed he was fulfilling the national will because Hitler’s genius was his understanding of nature and its centrality to nation-building. The national parks were put to service in the Nazis’ policies for national recovery.31 The ambition to restore the Germanic game was the mirror of the Aryan being. The Aryan man and Germanic game co-existed in the timeless myth of antiquity. Heck’s ambitions were not limited to Göring, he accepted honorary membership to the SS (June 1933) unusually before joining the Nazi Party (May 1937). He served Himmler’s SS-Ahnenerbe (society for Ancestral heritage) founded in 1935. This SS institute advanced research into racial theories and championed Aryan primacy. Among this group of Nazis, the plans for Białowieźa were conceived.
The ideological lynchpin necessary to complete Göring’s corporatism and institutionalisation was some form of honour code. In 1936 Scherping, under Göring’s orders, instructed Walter Frevert (1897–1962) a state forester and hunter, to write a book about Nazi-German hunting customs. The Jagdliches Brauchtum (1936) drowned the reader in völkisch claptrap but proved to be an instant political and public success. Scherping’s foreword to the book was opaque, ‘The German people are grateful to the Führer for restoring and awakening old and beautiful customs.’ The success of the book led to Frevert’s elevation to Göring’s inner circle and later as a Leibjäger, a personal hunter and confidante, an important position in the hunt hierarchy. Frevert was born in Hamm (Westphalia), his father was a dentist; but, after a distinguished war record as a young volunteer, and a period in the Freikorps, he chose to become a state forester specialising in the hunt. His first forestry rank was Forstassessor and was promoted in 1928 to Forstmeister while serving in Battenberg. Frevert had joined veterans’ associations but in May 1933 became a member of the Nazi Party, and in the summer joined the SA. Frevert’s Nazi membership initially looked like career opportunism, but his subsequent behaviour singled him out as a racist zealot.32
The Jagdliches Brauchtum was an orchestrated departure from the traditions set down by Ferdinand von Raesfeld in 1914. Frevert dispensed with historical accuracy, ignored quips about pompous hunters, and revelled in any applicable German sources. He adapted a poem by Ernest de Bunsen (1819–1903) to express his sentimentality of the hunt: ‘The origin of the hunter is in the long past close to paradise. There were no trade people, no soldiers, no doctors, no priests, no lawyers but there were already hunters.’33 However, a serious shortfall in sources about German hunt customs and even fewer German methods led him to invent material for his book. The final version of Jagdliches Brauchtum was a Nazi fantasy composed of made-up stories, plagiarised ideas and foreign rituals. He confessed his reasons were for a good cause, but nobody cared because the book met the approval of all things völkisch prevailing at the time.34
The climax of the inventions was the Bruchzeichen, a centrepiece of ritual and a ceremony of ‘breaking’ the dead game. Once the animal was killed and retrieved, the Bruch was started. The ceremony opened with a tune from a hunting horn to the dead animal. The hunter then placed a sprig in the animal’s mouth representing its Letzter Bissen (the last meal). The sprigs were taken from oak, spruce, fir, alder or pine trees. The hunter then placed a sprig over the beast’s heart and another covering its nether regions. The hunter’s companion then dipped a sprig of leaves into the animal’s blood, drew his dagger with his left hand, placed the sprig on the blade, and presented it to the hunter. The hunter then took the sprig with his left hand, uttered the words Weidmann’s Dank (the hunter’s thanks), and fixed the blood-soaked sprig to the left side of his hat. If a bloodhound had participated in the kill, it also received a twig placed in its collar. Once the first part of the ceremony was completed the hunter opened up the carcass and removed the entrails.
Image 1: left to right, Oberforstmeister Walter Frevert Rominten, Göring in his capacity as Reichsjägermeister and Oberstjägermeister Ulrich Scherping.
Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1979-145-13A / CC-BY-SA 3.0
Image 2: Senior Luftwaffe and state foresters in the lounge area in Rominten. A painting of a European Bison is hung on the far wall.
Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1979-144-15A / CC-BY-SA 3.0
Image 3: European Bison in Białowieźa.
Source: Author, 2009.
Once completed, the hunter began the Totenwacht (guard the dead), an hour-long vigil over the carcass. During this hour the hunter was expected to reflect on the sublime kill and recall past hunts with all their joys and miseries. The carcass was then included in the total tally for the final rituals. The dead carcasses were arranged in order of nobility, size, and by rank, like soldiers on a parade ground. If it was a large tally, braziers and flaming torches were added to the ambience of the moment. The results of the day’s hunt were then read aloud. The horns sounded several more tunes, announcing the end of the hunt at which point the hunters and their guests would raise their right arms in the Hitler Gruss (Nazi salute). Then followed the final horn sounding the Halali (tally-ho). After the ceremonies were over the hunters retired to the dining room to partake in the Tot-trinken (toast to the kill). The antlers were placed on tables, with candles and more sprigs added for decoration. Dinner was then served by silver service.35
Deconstructing Frevert’s invention is not difficult. David Dalby has explained the Bruchzeichen was a French ceremony. He claimed when German nobles were offered the ritual in the Middle Ages, they expressed no interest.36 The Letzter Bissen originated in James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1922), which was conveniently published in German in translation in 1928.37 Frevert’s justification, was the Totenwacht had increasingly appealed to hunters in the two decades since circa 1916. This had associations with the widespread death cults and ceremonies that emerged during the Great War. Frevert confessed two music scores were composed for the book by Professor Cleving (Berlin). They were the Muffel tot and the Halali.38 Gritzbach, Göring’s Nazi biographer, claimed the Jagdliches Brauchtum restored the ‘heroic realism’ and traditions of the past. He enthused over the combination of faith in Urwald (primaeval wilderness) and its relationship to Germanic hunting customs. He believed Frevert’s efforts would form the common etiquette for all German hunters.39 The institutionalisation of the Jagdliches Brauchtum brought uniformity, while the reinvention of customs and traditions helped assimilate Nazi ritualism within the hunt. Ceremonies were devised that honoured the dead and invoked pagan pre-Christian style rituals that had never been associated with German hunt lore.40 The death ceremony was an invention and few in history have been quite so blatant. This bizarre story of the invention, however, found its way into Nazi ceremonies and rituals that preceded the Holocaust. To paraphrase Hobsbawm, ‘nothing appears more ancient, and linked with an immemorial past than the customs’ of the German hunt. In 1970 the German hunt handbook still referred to the ideas of Oberforstmeister Frevert and Scherping.41 Hosbawm opined that customs are not a brake on innovation and precedent can be changed when appearing to bring about ‘social continuity and natural law’.42 Like Faust, Frevert had made a pact with the devil.
II. The Blue
The Luftwaffe uniform colour was blue-grey. The colour selection was to distinguish the Luftwaffe uniform from the grey-green of the army and Kriegsmarine. ‘The Blue’, unlike state forestry was a ‘new’ Nazi elite. From the outset it was as an institution burdened with internal tensions and riddled with mediocre leadership. A postwar narrative of Luftwaffe history was manufactured by Adolf Galland’s based upon his memories and fantasies. In The First and the Last (1950) Galland effectively rganizatio his political involvement in the Nazi state. He acknowledged Göring as the founder of the Luftwaffe, but was reluctant to discuss the deeper Nazi pedigree. He also recognised that Göring had allocated forty per cent of total rearmament costs to the Luftwaffe, while he was responsible for the Third Reich’s economy.43 His most serious criticism was also toward Göring, as ‘supreme commander’, for surrounding himself with his Great War cronies. Galland claimed they shared a common failing of not understanding modern aviation.44 Where Galland was less forthcoming was how the Luftwaffe had been incubated through the RFA’s paramilitary structure. The Luftwaffe’s rganization, air bases, depots, manpower, structure and ideology were acquired from RFA resources. Galland dropped a hint of this relationship in reference to the Elchwald estate that served as the headquarters for his command. Göring turned over his palatial lodges into Luftwaffe headquarters for the duration of the war. The RFA facilitated the rapid rganization of the Luftwaffe across the estates and bases in East Prussia.
The reasons for Galland’s myth-making are not difficult to deconstruct. Stephan Bungay argued the Luftwaffe was as much political as it was a military rganization.45 He pointed to the Göring and Ernst Udet (1896–1941) relationship, as the champions of the warrior-hero ethos. They introduced the notion of ‘romantic amateurism’ as the ideological glue of the officer corps. Bungay believed this stunted the Luftwaffe’s military development. The Luftwaffe had been raised from a broad cross-section of the population, unlike the army it was recruited nationally rather by state like the army.46 Bungay focusing aircrew noted that by 1939 the officer corps had reached 15,000 comprising of pilots, army officers, and the technical services. In basic training, the Luftwaffe instilled an attitude of common experience and service. During the Spanish Civil War, according to Bungay, the German aces became poisoned by ‘romantic amateurism’. Galland was a typical example of this clique. He was known to have recommended the removal of radios as unnecessary in the cockpit of fighting aeroplanes, in a dubious challenge to modernity.47 Bungay was deeply critical of Göring, Udet, Galland and others but blamed this on traits of the ‘Herrenvolk’ and the temporary loyalty of the pack that followed whoever was leader.48 There was a persuasive argument but not entirely accurate and misunderstood the nature of Nazism. The deteriorating fortunes of war encouraged a rise in the cliques but their loyalty to Hitler never waivered.
Image 4: Reichsmarschall Göring, Lw.Generalmajor Adolf Galland, Lw.Generaloberst Bruno Loerzer and Reichminister Albert Speer, August 1943.
Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-J15189 / Lange, Eitel / CC-BY-SA 3.0
Göring’s military ambitions for the Luftwaffe was more sophisticated and corporate than Bungay could imagine. There are signposting clues in the literature and archives. In the foreword to the 1933 edition of Richthofen’s biography Göring wrote, ‘I was honoured by the confidence shown in me when I was appointed the last commander of the Jagdgeschwader Richthofen. This appointment has bound me forever and I will carry this responsibility in the spirit of Richthofen.’49 During a meeting in 1944, Lw.General of Paratroops Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke confronted Göring over the command of the airborne formations. The reply was unexpected. Göring explained why they must remain under his command: ‘I’m glad that I have them under my own wing in the Luftwaffe so that they are steeped in the spirit of the Luftwaffe … it’s the spirit that counts. In the same way … the French revolutionary army … in Paris simply swept away all the old French guards who’d had years of training.’50 In allied captivity, in 1945, Galland testified to British interrogators that Göring told him in early 1941, ‘In a few months we shall attack Russia … the whole affair was meant to last ten weeks at the most. After that the army was to be reduced to sixty ‘Divisonen[sic]’. But they were to be elite troops to hold the west, and the remainder of the ‘Divisionen’[sic] so released would be used for building an Air Force. Everything was to be put in the Air Force. That was the Führer’s plan.’51 These three anecdotes reveal something about Göring’s concepts of leadership, rganization and fantasies.
The subject of leadership has always raised questions about Göring’s ability. His senior Luftwaffe adjutants were known colloquially as the ‘small general staff’. The most significant member of this clique was Lw.Colonel Bernd von Brauchitsch, nephew of Colonel-General von Brauchitsch, chief of the army until 1941.52 There was no official job description for his post, but under cross-examination before the Nuremburg tribunal, in March 1946, Brauchitsch explained:
I was the first military adjutant of the Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe. I held the rank of chief adjutant. I had the job of making the daily arrangements as ordered by the Commander-in-Chief and working out the adjutants’ duty roster. The military position had to be reported daily; military reports and messages only to the extent that they were not communicated by the offices themselves. I had no command function.53
Brauchitsch’s importance to Białowieźa was his role as an intermediary forwarding Göring’s orders to the battalion(s) and in return collating their regular reports. Galland offered his allied interrogators an abrasive opinion of Brauchitsch. On 16 May 1945 he said:
Brauchitsch has been with him [Göring] for four or five years and he had a very bad influence, in that he always concerned himself with politics and didn’t hold himself aloof; as a chief ‘Adjutant’ he should have—the varying information should be condensed, but not selected.54
Image 5: Bernd von Brauchitsch in his cell in Nuremberg prison 1946.
Source: NARA, Hoffmann Collection.
Setting aside Galland’s dislike of Brauchitsch, the evaluation that he was inclined to side with decisions and sift reports was not unusual in Göring’s world. Galland of course was an integral member of the same command structure and his reputation was never really tested over his influence on shaping the fighter command. However, what can be drawn from the observations by the senior echelons of the Luftwaffe was the absence of ‘band of brothers’ style fraternity.
The RFA/Luftwaffe rganization documentation highlights an intensive period of planning around 1935–7 and subsequent annual updates. Evidence of this rganization planning can be found in other scholarship.55 From 1935 apprentice foresters and gamekeepers were required to serve for one year in the army (later the Luftwaffe) before becoming foresters. Older candidates were expected to participate in a three-month military refresher course alongside other Nazi officials.56 Michael Imort has argued this, ‘was all it took to rganization the forest service.’ The Luftwaffe’s rganization and peacetime expansion was based upon a general rganization calendar drawn up by the RFA in the mid-1930s and continually updated to 1940.57 Göring was determined to set in motion plans for the rganization of the Reichsforstbeamte (RFA’s public servants) including all members of the hunt offices to the Luftwaffe. This process behind a rganization calendar issued precise instructions for the transfer of all forestry officials to the Luftwaffe command structure. In 1936 forestry manpower numbered 870,000, and even by 1945 although greatly depleted forestry could still supply conscripts under the general Wehrmacht reserve assessment.58 The RFA’s rganization in the event of war was bound to the Wehrwirtschaftstab (economic warfare staff) of the Luftwaffe with wood and timber both regarded as strategic raw materials. During the war, forestry manpower was rganizat through the Luftwaffe although foresters served in specialist forestry units of the army, navy and Waffen-SS.59 Further evidence of rganizationn rganizationn can be found in the blue-grey uniforms with green insignia that recognised foresters serving in the Luftwaffe.60 From very early on the Luftwaffe was imbued with National Socialist spirit and by August 1944 it numbered between 2.8 and 5 million men, women and youths depending upon on which authority. The largest number of troops were in the ground forces and, in terms of manpower alone, the Luftwaffe constitutes a significant historical entity.61
In meeting Hitler’s expectations, the Luftwaffe departed from the traditional military formation, incorporating the dogma behind ideological warriors. The roots of this rganizationn began in 1929 when Göring informed the Reichstag of the inevitability of a future German air force.62 Once in power, Göring’s first priority was to consolidate political power. As Minister-President of Prussia, Göring ordered the raising of reserve police and volunteer paramilitary units. They combined his military expertise, with paramilitary policing methods, in security actions to crush left-wing political parties and communists. The police flying squad (Polizeiabteilung z.b.v. Wecke), named after its commander was mustered on 23 February 1933, with a force of 14 officers and 400 men. This formation was garrisoned in the Friesenkaserne, in Berlin, and became ‘godfather’ to the first SS detachments sealing that special relationship between the SS, police, and the Luftwaffe.63 Wecke’s first police actions were on 2 March 1933, rounding up communists and Marxists in Berlin. In 1936 this unit was turned into Prussian police regiment General Göring and was then transferred to the Luftwaffe to form a bodyguard. By 1944, this bodyguard had transformed from a regiment to the panzer division Hermann Göring, and by the war’s end was designated an airborne-panzer-corps.64
The social appeal of Luftwaffe recruitment was the proximity to advanced technology, aviation and the sense of speed. Compared to the SS, the Luftwaffe represented a larger and more interesting option for the nobility deeply bound by its class, its racism and elitism. Under Göring’s leadership flying, hunting and highbrow rganizatio offered an extension of the prestige, privilege and stimulus they were socially accustomed to. The list of nobles that joined the Luftwaffe included: Philipp Landgrave of Hesse (Nazi party member 1930), Nikolaus von Below (Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant), Günther Freiher von Maltzhahn (fighter ace and senior officer), Wolfram Freiher von Richthofen (cousin of Manfred, senior field commander), Heinrich Prinz zu Sayn-Wittgenstein and Egmont Prinz zur Lippe-Weissenfeld (both night fighter aces) and Hans Graf von Sponeck (airborne forces commander). However, like the German hunt, the majority of would-be flyers hailed from the middle-class with strong social values that were based upon professionalism, technocracy and innovation. Even working-class boys saw advantages of technical training and apprenticeship that offered greater opportunities for career advancement.
The proximity to the hunt did not appeal to all flyers. There was a significant group of flyers who rejected the hunt from their entrenched National Socialist ideology. The leading exponent of this group was Hans-Ulrich Rudel. He was a highly decorated flyer who rejected the hunt as a true disciple of Hitler, but was also a guardian of his social class. Göring’s different treatment of Rudel and Galland was influenced by social backgrounds. Both men went to great pains to explain their social backgrounds in their memoirs. Rudel was individualistic, the son of a Lutheran pastor, drank milk, didn’t smoke and spent most of his free time enjoying sports (athletics and skiing).65 Galland’s father was the bailiff of Graf von Westerholt’s estate; a position held by generations and a Huguenot family that left France in 1742. From the age of seven, Galland’s father taught him to shoot and hunt. He was encouraged to fly gliders and enter for the Lufthansa entrance examination.66 Rudel had to wait until he joined the Luftwaffe before he learned to fly. Rudel’s meetings with ‘the chief’ (Göring) were uncomfortable and brief in comparison with his meetings with Hitler. Rudel was the Führer’s favourite and similar characters. Galland recalled hunting a stag in Rominten—a gift bestowed by Göring, ‘it was really a royal beast, the stag of a lifetime.’67 Recently discovered films show Galland at ease in meetings and during meals in the relaxed atmosphere of Göring’s headquarters.68 During a visit to one of Göring’s castles, Rudel came face-to-face with the Reichsmarschall ‘rigged out in German hunting costume and shooting with a bow and arrow.’69 This was a counter-narrative about the ‘other’ Luftwaffe as a Nazi rganization that embraced polycratic persuasions.70 Rudel’s ideas came close to the blood and soil rhetoric of the SS and their 1936, claim to be an anti-Bolshevik combat rganization.71 In this regard, the SS and the Luftwaffe were both sides of the same coin. SS zealotry was drawn from pagan myths of blood and soil, while the Luftwaffe drew on the mystery of the forest and the skies. Both Rudel and Galland remained blindly obedient to Hitler.
III. Raising a social-military order
The Jagdliches Brauchtum symbolised more than a Nazification of the hunt. It was an attempt by Göring to anchor invented traditions to the German past, but looking forward to a new ill-defined military order. Frevert had formulated an honour code. This was a synthesis of cultures both German and Nazi, hunting and military. It was system for social induction and regulation. The most important feature was the honour system. The Waidgerechtigkeit (hunt justice) raised localised courts of honour. This code was grounded in the strict discipline of the laws and regulations of the hunt. The simplicity of the system made it transferable to wider society and shared similar procedures to the later Nazi people’s courts. This was regulation through a moralistic almost Kantian code, for example: unlicenced shooting and feeding game were serious crimes, while shooting game struggling in a metre of snow was regarded as ungentlemanly conduct. Wounded game had to be located and killed before any further hunting. The hunter was cautioned not to shoot from too great a distance in case he missed. The hunter was warned not to dishonour the dead by sitting or standing on the carcass. The game was not to be fed during a crisis like severe winter conditions or drought. The application of this morality code found its way into Luftwaffe etiquette and manuals of discipline. In 1940 Göring formed an honour court over a disagreement that developed during the Norway Campaign, between Stuka pilots and paratroopers. There is no known outcome.
Frevert recommended no alcohol while hunting because it weakened responsibility and raised the bloodlust. This was a reaction to the popularity of the small Jägermeister pocket bottles, dubbed Göring’s Schnapps, which was distilled by Mast-Jägermeister SE (Wolfenbüttel) and distributed from 1935. He also encouraged the Schüsseltreiben (social gatherings) when all hunters dined communally. The single course of Eintopf (stew) with Sauerkraut and pork, was hailed as the noble family dish for the Volksgemeinschaft. Frevert only allowed drinking in the lodge after the days’ hunting. The alcoholic toasts for these gatherings included the communal Horrido. He described the Horrido as being of equal importance to the Nazi party’s Sieg Heil or the army’s Hoorah. During the toasts, a jug of beer was passed around for each member to raise a toast, drink and shout the Horrido. All drinking parties had rules and for the evening a kangaroo court judged party delinquents who were placed before three ‘noble’ judges. The punishments ranged from communal ridicule to fines for serious breaches of etiquette. All monies were given to orphans or to winter aid. Frevert also insisted all hunters, without exception, venerated 3 November as the sacred Hubertustag (St. Hubertus day—patron of hunting).72
The Jagdliches Brauchtum was the ideological glue that sealed the officer corps of both the Blue and the Green within Göring’s court. Frevert advocated a code of conduct for ‘the noble or aristocratic pleasure … the highest form of masculine yearning … culture bearers of the nation.’73 All hunters were to be militarised, regimented and armed; in this context, the Jagdliche Brauchtum contributed to building Göring’s military doctrine.74 A significant part of the book was the adoption of invented culture and traditions that had no precedent in the German hunt. The sole purpose was to instil an esprit du corps through the introduction of ceremonies, the correct use of hunting horns, the application of field signals to raise communications, and the introduction of self-regulated courts of honour. Frevert complained about the social barriers of rural society that had become entrenched in the division between the hunt and agriculture. To reconcile this problem, he plumbed the depths of völkisch idealism in a polemic about capitalism’s destruction of the German way of life and promised the old ways would be restored. He dismissed the existence of any underlying social and cultural differences between the peasant farmer and the elitist hunter hailing both as völkischer Kulturträger (culture bearers of the nation). They would be militarised, regimented and armed; in this context, the Jagdliche Brauchtum was not just an almanack of invented traditions but served as the basic honour code for Göring’s court and organisations.75 This dogma underpinned the ideas for Białowieźa.
This system failed and calamitous consequences. Göring and Udet had been comrades in war and peace. Frevert had recollections of Udet as a regular guest at Rominten who was known for fun and frivolity. Everyone noticed that Göring and Udet used the informal and friendly ‘du’ when greeting and when together. Frevert recalled Udet sketched Göring on a beer mat stalking on his stomach. He drew a large posterior and on each rear cheek was stamped with the German cross and German Hunting Association shield, so as no one in his company could be offended. Göring enjoyed such jokes and thought the sketch was funny. According to Frevert, Udet was known as a great fighter ace but he was a lousy rifleman having missed several stags. Göring would often jibe Udet for his failings. One day a stag was caught in wire and Göring jokingly told him they had ‘wired the stag for Udet to shoot’. Uncertain over whether he should shoot or not Udet hesitated, but just as he pulled the trigger the stag broke free and he missed. Göring was convulsed with laughter. Udet eventually killed the stag with a second shot but the jokes were on him.76 Frevert recalled Udet’s suicide in 1941 was a hard blow for Göring. Before killing himself, Udet had scrawled in red on the headboard of his bed: ‘Reichsmarschall, why have you deserted me?’ Frevert concluded, they had been comrades and hunted together, but Göring convened a court of enquiry with a view to a posthumous court-martial.77
Göring deserted Udet because there were other men, more pliable and willing to do his bidding; men like Walter Frevert and Adolf Galland. In the early years, they worked towards the successful synthesis of The Blue and The Green. They were behind a civil-military institution that synthesised the politics of ecology, the politics of advanced warfare and the politics of racial extermination. Göring’s ideological ambitions were colossal, perhaps limitless, but the merger of ‘The Green’ and ‘The Blue’ served his corporatism. Eventually, this turned into an uncomfortable and wieldy marriage further unsettled by Göring’s notorious lifestyle. With the outbreak of war, the Green estates became operational headquarters for the Blue command system. This placed the hunt within close proximity to headquarters staff, making it more than just a rest and recuperation reward for combat weary troops. The Carinhall hunting estate, forty miles northeast of Berlin, was erected in the Schorfheide, a nationalised nature reserve. This grandiose complex was described by Frank Uekoetter as the most ‘pompous’ and costliest of all Göring’s residences. However, he overlooked how the intermingling of functions, between military headquarters and hunt lodges, skewed the social order of the Luftwaffe command system. Under Göring’s supreme control, patronage was politicised that inturn ramped up the prestige. Diplomacy and politics continued from Carinhall,78 Rominten became the favoured retreat, but Göring’s headquarters train, Robinson became the centre of decision-making in regards to the Białowieźa mission. By April 1945, Göring had destroyed both Carinhall and Rominten.79
1 Erich Gritzbach, Hermann Göring, Werk und Mensch, (München, 1938), pp. 114–116.
2 Robert Gellately (ed), Leon Goldensohn, The Nuremberg Interviews: An American Psychiatrists Conversations with the Defendants and Witnesses, (London, 2006), p. 128.
3 Richard W. Mackay, The Zabern Affair 1913–1914, (Lanhan, 1991).
4 Wolfgang Paul, Hermann Göring: Hitler Paladin or Puppet? trans. Helmut Bögler, (London, 1998) p. 39. See also Stefan Martens, Hermann Göring: “erster Paladin des Führers” und “Zweiter Mann im Reich”, (Paderborn, 1985). Gordon Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640–1945, (Oxford, 1978), p. 40.
5 Richard Overy, Interrogations: Inside the Minds of the Nazi Elite, (London, 2001), pp. 141–152.
6 Peter Uiberall on Göring, in Adam Curtis, ‘The Living Dead’, BBC, 1995.
7 Andreas Gautschi, Der Reichsjägermeiste: Fakten und Legenden um Hermann Göring, (Suderburg, 1999), p. 53.
8 See on this: Stefan Dirscherl, Tier- und Naturschutz im Nationalsozialismus: Gesetzgebung, Ideologie und Praxis, (Göttingen, 2012), and Tier- und Naturschutz im Nationalsozialismus: Gesetzgebung.
9 https://www.academia.edu/43096984/Weidmanns_Heil_a_history_of_Social _Hunting_and_the_German_Middle_Class_1848_1914_ 27 April 2020.
10 Ferdinand von Raesfeld, Das Deutsche Weidwerk: Ein Lehr- und Handbuch der Jagd, (Berlin, 1914).
11 Fritz Röhrig, Wald und Weidwerk: In Geschichte und Gegenwart, (Potsdam, 1933, 1938 and 2003).
12 Ibid., p. 176–178.
13 Ibid., p. 205–209.
14 Ibid., p. 213–215.
15 Nigel H. Jones, Hitler’s Heralds: The Story of the Freikorps 1918–1923, (London, 1987), pp. 124–125.
16 Michael Vale, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe, 1270–1380, (Oxford, 2002), p. 184.
17 Gautschi, Der Reichsjägermeister, p. 44.
18 http://digital.library.wise.edu/1711.dl/AldoLeopold/Writings Miscellaneous Manuscripts; Lectures; Yale Reports; German notes pp. 938–944. 27 April 2021
19 Ibid.
20 Kurt Mantel, Reichsjagdgesetz, (München, 1934), pp. 23–25.
21 Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power, p. 221.
22 Alan E. Steinweis, Kristallnacht 1938, (Cambridge Mass., 2009), pp. 104–105. See also Susanne Heim & Götz Aly, ‘Staatliche Ordnung und ‘organische Lösung’. Die Rede Hermann Görings ‘über die Judenfrage’ vom 6 Dezember 1938’, Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 2, 1993, pp. 378–404.
23 BArch, R3701/2033, Reichforstamt, Forstamt Steegen, SS-Lagers Stutthof 15 August 1941.
24 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, (London, 1989), pp. 137–179.
25 Lutz Heck, Auf Tiersuche in Weiter Welt, (Berlin, 1943), pp. 232–296.
26 http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/AldoLeopold, Clifford F. Butcher, ‘Every Farm in Wisconsin to Be a Game Preserve’, The Milwaukee Journal, Sunday, January 5, 1936, p. 2 and p. II, 27 April 2021.
27 Aldo Leopold, ‘Deer and Dauerwald in Germany. I. History’, Journal of Forestry 34, No.4 and 5 (1936), p. 366–7.
28 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almamanac: And Sketches Here and There, (New York, 1949).
29 Walter Frevert, Rominten, (München, 1957), p. 216.
30 Frank Uekoetter, The Green and the Brown: A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany, (Cambridge, 2006), p. 72
31 Heck, Auf Tiersuche in Weiter Welt, pp. 215.
32 Andreas Gautschi, Walter Frevert, Eines Waidmanns Wechsel und Wege, (Melsungen, 2005), see also BArch, Lw. Personalakte, Walter Frevert.
33 Ibid., p. 12
34 Gautschi, Der Reichsjägermeister, pp. 89–92.
35 Walter Frevert, Jagdliches Brauchtum, (Berlin, 1936), pp. 51–69.
36 David Dalby, Lexicon of The Mediaeval German Hunt: A Lexicon of Middle High German Terms (1050–1500) associated with the Chase, Hunting with Bows, Falconry, Trapping and Fowling, (Berlin, 1965), pp. i–v.
37 Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, (London, 1993), p. 521.
38 Frevert, Jagdliches Brauchtun, 1936, p. 68.
39 Gritzbach, Hermann Göring, p. 118.
40 Ibid., p. 33 and 134.
41 Richard Blasé, Die Jägerprüfung, (Melsungen, 1970), p. 17 referred to Frevert and p. 268 Scherping.
42 Eric Hobsbawm/Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 1–4, 6, 104.
43 Adolf Galland, The First and the Last: The German Fighter Force in the World War II, (London, 1970), p. 100.
44 Ibid., pp. 13–17, p. 55.
45 Stephan Bungay, The Most Dangerous Enemy: A History of the Battle of Britain, (London, 2010), p. 80 and p. 188.
46 Ibid. p. 92.
47 Ibid., p. 88.
48 Ibid., p. 82.
49 Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen, Der Rote Kampfflieger, (Berlin, 1933), foreword: ‘Manfred von Richthofen zum Gedächtnis – Hermann Göring.’
50 Sönke Neitzel (ed), Tapping Hitler’s Generals: Transcripts of Secret Conversations, 1942–45, trans. Geoffrey Brooks, (Barnsley, 2007), pp. 113–117.
51 TNA, WO208/4170 C.S.D.I.C. (UK), S.R.G.G. 1230(C), Generalleutnant Galland (JV44), Captured Tegernsee 5 May 1945, interrogation on the 17 May 1945.
52 BArch, RL31/3, Kriegstagebuch LWSB, 6 August 1942.
53 The Avalon Project, at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/03-12-46.asp Cross-examination by Dr. Stahmer, 12 March 1946.
54 TNA WO208/4170 C.S.D.I.C. (UK), S.R.G.G. 1228(C), Generalleutnant Galland (JV44), Captured Tegernsee 5 May 1944, interrogation on the 16 May 1945.
55 James Corum, The Luftwaffe: Creating the Operational Air War, 1918–1940, (Kansas, 1997).
56 Michael Imort, ‘“Forestopia”: the use of the forest landscape in naturalizing National Socialist policies of Volk, race and Lebensraum 1918–1945’, PhD Thesis, Queen’s University, 2000, pp. 485–486.
57 BArch RW 19/936.Wehrwirtsschaftstab, Mobilisation Kalender (Berlin, 26 April 1939). File indicated in the event of war the Reichsforstamt would be mobilised under the Luftwaffe.
58 NARA, RG242, T77/780/5506284-5506484 Wehrmacht Ersatzplan 1945, section 62, Reichsforstamt.
59 NARA, RG242, OKW Wehrwirtschafts- und Rüstungsamt (OKW Wi Ru Amt): T77/100/824182 on RFA manpower and T77/145/880000-50, RFA mobilisation to Economic Warfare Staff.
60 Roger James Bender, The Luftwaffe: Air, Organisation of the Third Reich, (Atglen, 1997).
61 NARA, RG242, T77/780/5506284-568, OKW-WEA, Wehrmacht-Ersatzplan 1945, recorded an all-branches manpower level of 1,966,862 on 1 October 1944, while the Air Ministry (1948), The Rise and Fall of the German Air Force (1933 to 1945), London: Pamphlet 248, p. 395, recorded an estimate of 2,304,500 on 15 December 1944, for all branches.
62 Air Ministry, p.4. Air Ministry (A.C.A.S.[I]), The Rise and Fall of the German Air Force (1933 to 1945), (London 1948). Thanks to Manny Phelps for the loan of this book.
63 Rudolf Lehmann, The Leibstandarte, trans. Nick Olcott, (Winnipeg, 1987), p.1.
64 This division was eventually designated the Fallschirm-Panzer-Division 1 Hermann Göring. For simplification purposes this formation is referred to the Hermann Göring Division throughout the rest of the book.
65 Rudel, Stuka Pilot, pp. 1–9.
66 Galland, First and the Last, pp. 1–9.
67 Ibid., p. 88.
68 https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1002569 27 April 2021.
69 Rudel, Stuka Pilot, p. 118.
70 Ibid., p. 354.
71 Bernd Wegner, Waffen-SS: Organization, Ideology and Function, trans. Ronald Webster, (Oxford, 1990).
72 Ibid., pp. 112–121.
73 Ibid., p. 33 and 134.
74 Ibid., p. 6, and 104.
75 Ibid., p. 6, and 104.
76 Frevert, Rominten (1957), p. 223.
77 Cajus Bekker, The Luftwaffe War Diaries, (London, 1972), p. 401 and p. 295.
78 Volker Knopf, Stefan Martens, Görings Reich. Selbstinszenierungen in Carinhall, (Berlin, 1999).
79 Frank Uekoetter, The Green and the Brown: A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany, (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 101–7.
2. The Conquest of Wilderness
Combining diplomacy and hunting proved to be lucrative politics for Göring. From 1934 he led the negotiations with Poland over Danzig and later took control of German-Polish relations. There are accounts that Göring was repeatedly invited by the Polish ambassador to hunt in Białowieźa from 19341, but the only official and detailed account came from February 1937. The hunt was set to a time when the snakes were in hibernation. The Polish hunting officials agreed a lynx would be a suitable trophy. The gamekeepers cornered a Lynx, but it managed to escape the night before Germans arrived. Göring was well received but on the day of the hunt, his tally was small with three wolves and two wild boars. Scherping, however, not only bagged more game but also killed a young lynx. Before the Nazi delegation departed, Göring announced that he better appreciated the difficulties of hunting in a “Polish primaeval forest”.2 In November 1937, Germany hosted the International Hunting Exhibition in Berlin. The RFA promoted this as an international event comparable to the Olympic Games (1936). The Polish contingent included representatives from Białowieźa national park. Adolf Hitler’s appeared, on 6 November, and was hailed by the RFA as the high point of the exhibition.3 The exhibition was a triumph for Göring. During the exhibition, Göring told the Polish ambassador the Jews and Bolshevism were dragging the world into war.4 In 1938 Göring secured Poland’s agreement to German demands during the Sudeten crisis promising it was Germany’s ‘last territorial claim.’ Göring’s confidence was riding high after the Luftwaffe’s success in the Spanish Civil War. The Nazi author commissioned to write the operational history incorporated Göring’s ambition of the Greater German Reich as the purpose of his diplomacy and war-making.5
Image 6: Preparation for a diplomatic function at Rominten. Note the Nordic runes on the picture rail under the ceiling.
Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1979-138-33 / CC-BY-SA 3.0
Diplomacy, hunting and rituals reached its apotheosis during the Polish crisis (1938–39). An important account of these events came from Sir Neville Henderson, British ambassador to Berlin. There were doubts over his selection as ambassador. He joined the diplomatic service in 1905. Henderson had a reputation for ‘jujitsu methods in diplomacy’, a tendency to ‘go native’, and was prone to hero-worship. Anthony Eden’s secretary thought he might be ‘another Ribbentrop to Berlin.’ Peter Neville found sources that noted Henderson could shoot adding to his suitability.6 Henderson’s memoirs recalled his visits with Göring at Carinhall in 1938 and being taken around the European Bison breeding pens. Göring subsequently invited him to hunt in Rominten Heide. His observations about the leading officers of ‘The Green’, in their political heartland, was insightful. Henderson noted the lodge was a ‘simple shooting-box with a thatched roof’. The serving staff included maids and a servant, working in a comfortable but relaxed atmosphere.7 Henderson was introduced to the leading RFA and Jagdamt officials and went hunting with them. The party included: “One of his [Göring’s] Swedish brothers-in-law, Count Rosen, was the only other guest, and the rest of the party consisted of Oberstjägermeister Scherping, Oberstjägermeister Menthe, and a young air officer A.D.C., von Brauschitz [sic Brauchitsch], a son [nephew] of the present German commander-in-chief.” Absent from the recollection, but known to be present, was Oberforstmeiser Walter Frevert. The ambience of the wilderness and the solemn rituals captivated Henderson and he described the Bruchzeichen and Totenwacht ceremonies. He heard ‘the hallali [sic] … sounded on the horns of the jägers [sic] …’8
Henderson explained the differences between “stag-shooting” in Europe to deer stalking in Britain. The stags cannot be found so easily in the dense European forests, so were tracked by their roar during the rutting season. A Hochstände (high stand) was usually placed where the stags grazed or rutted. According to Henderson, all the huntsmen had to do was climb the stand and shoot the stag. Henderson’s first hunt included Scherping and Menthe as companions. He lay on his stomach and crawled to a good shooting position and killed a stag. When Göring was told, he allegedly roared with laughter having previously bemoaned that British hunters were very capable with shotguns, but not so with rifles. He was amused by the image of Henderson on his belly and announced to his courtiers it was the perfect place for diplomats. The ‘jujitsu diplomat’ melted under Göring’s generosity and liked him. Henderson recalled how Göring confessed his youthful support for the Boer guerillas but admired the British pirates like Sir Francis Drake. He regretted the British had been ‘debrutalised’.9 In 1940 Henderson blamed Göring for his lack of moral integrity that led to the outbreak of war.
I. War
The Second World War in Eastern Europe began at 4.45 am on 1 September 1939 when the old German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on Polish fortifications in Danzig (Gdansk: Poland).10 The Bialystok-Białowieźa area came within the Soviet zone, under the protocols of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. The German Army advanced into Białowieźa ten days before the Red Army. The 413th Infantry Regiment, 206th Infantry Division, arrived in Hajnówka on 12 September.11 Rumours claimed the Luftwaffe bombed the Tsarist styled Orthodox Church and a Soviet military hospital by accident. The ‘Berlin Bear’ symbol made an appearance as the 3rd Panzer Division’s vehicle insignias as it drove through towards Brest-Litovsk.12 Locals claimed Göring declared the forest a heiliger Hain (sacred grove) and under his protection. During the brief occupation the innkeeper of the Źubr tavern, Michał Zdankiewicz, was killed for venting criticism against the Germans. Before shooting Zdankiewicz, it’s rumoured the soldiers set their dogs on him.13 The Germans withdrew once the Red Army arrived on 21 September 1939.14. The Soviet occupation was marked by terror during a sustained period of violence, disorder, deportations and mass killings.15 Contemporary Polish allegations blamed the Ukrainians, Byelorussians and Jews within the communities of welcoming the Red Army as liberators. Jan Gross has argued that the Soviets encouraged violence against Poles as ‘thousands were killed, often with primitive and premeditated brutality.’ Peasant vigilantes were raised to administer ‘justice’, which led to atrocities.16 The Polish state bureaucracy and archives were ransacked and taken by the Soviet secret police (NKVD) to Moscow.17 There were mass arrests (130,000) and deportations (370,000) of Poles by the summer of 1941.18 The Soviets introduced the oblast (division), a regional system of government. The Bialystok oblast included Bielsk and incorporated Białowieźa as a sub-district.19
A local account has described the Soviet occupation of Białowieźa. Since 1937, trained NKVD agents were being infiltrated into Poland, their mission was to destabilise the borderlands. Paid collaborators organised communist cells and initiated strikes. Once the Soviets took control of the bureaucracy they instituted a system that isolated all inhabitants’ since the end of the Polish-Soviet War in 1921. Stalin ordered widespread arrests. On 19 December 1939 the Soviet commissar of Belarus released lists of persons for deportation. From February 1940, there were arrests and deportations of forestry officials and forest dwellers. An NKVD captain from Bialystok led the action, assisted by a lieutenant from Bielsk, who arrived with a list of 1,463 persons. This list included local farmers, public officials, and national park staff (92 clerk’s families and 46 families from the palace, museum and gamekeepers). The NKVD organized about 113 snatch squads each of three men to round up all those listed for deportation. The deportation trains were stabled in Białowieźa, Hajnówka, Narewka, and Bielsk Podlaski. The snatch squads, with dogs, started rounding up victims in the early hours. They forced people to pack and prepare their children and belongings within two hours. They bundled the people onto horse-drawn sledges and took them to the freight trains; the action was completed in one day.20 Almost two years later the Germans returned.
II. The Battle for Białowieźa (22–30 June 1941)
In the early hours of 22 June 1941, Hitler unleashed Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Soviet Russia. Army Group Centre was designated the task of conquering the area that included Białowieźa. The army group formed on the west bank of the River Bug. The operational plans called for a pincer movement forcing destructive encirclements on the Red Army. Białowieźa came within the scope of the Fourth Army’s southern pincer. The troops in the first wave were tasked with capturing Bialystok and Minsk. They were to advance at all costs, ignoring their flanks, leaving pockets of strong Soviet resistance. The second and third waves were tasked with mopping up isolated pockets of Red Army forces to sustain the momentum of the advance. Fourth Army commander, Field Marshal Günther Hans von Kluge, assigned the task of breaking through the forest to IX Army Corps, commanded by General of Infantry Hermann Geyer.21 The IX Corps’ fighting formations were three infantry divisions (137th, 253rd, and 292nd).22 Facing them were the Red Army’s 13th Mechanised Corps, and elements of the Tenth Army under Major-General Golubev.
In the early hours on 22 June, IX Corps struck out and within a matter of days, the 13th Mechanised Corps had disintegrated with stragglers dispersing throughout the forest.23 IX Corps’ official war diary has few details about the first week’s fighting. In 1942 Hermann Geyer was sacked during Hitler’s purge of the generals. He subsequently wrote an account of the campaign, recalling the first ten days as the ‘most beautiful in the long and heavy battle which started on the 22 June.’ There were many opportunities for independent decisions and actions; the troops ‘were fresh, full of hope and successful.’ The Germans crossed the River Bug and quickly developed the breakthrough ‘with a pursuit full of verve.’ The opening barrage began at 3.15 am and Geyer recalled it was an ‘impressive sight!’ Pioneers from the 78th Infantry Division (XIII Corps) finished the first pontoon bridge shortly after 9.00 am. With no concerted counterattacks by the Soviets, the Germans pushed across the river unimpeded. Although more pontoon bridges were constructed bottlenecks soon developed as the distance lengthened between the advancing forces and those moving up behind. Upon reaching the east bank of the river German troops struggled with the terrain. The 263rd Infantry Division was slowed by deep sand clogging the movement of horses and men. Fortunately for the Germans, there was no Red Army presence and the advance completed twenty kilometres on the first day.
Th next day there were sporadic outbursts of Soviet resistance. In Brjansk, Geyer became embroiled in a firefight as Russian tanks attempted a desperate breakout. His account again mentioned the sandy ground and forest terrain as serious obstacles in moving forward. The 263rd and the 137th Infantry Divisions struck out towards Bielsk on 23–24 June. The 137th, tasked with reaching Bielsk, was ordered to turn eastwards, while the 292nd faced a difficult situation. Its line of advance was fifty-five kilometres and followed a zigzag pattern plotted to avoid Soviet strong points. Its progress was hampered by the breakdown of its signals’ communications. At the same time, resistance from scattered Red Army units kept interrupting the division’s progress as it pushed on towards Kleszele on the River Nurzec. There were some ferocious skirmishes and on 23 June Colonel Christiani, commander of its 508th Infantry Regiment, was killed in action. The 508th was so heavily engaged that only with the timely arrival of assault guns was the line held against concerted Russian pressure. On 24 June Geyer attended a progress conference and his army group commander, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock warned: ‘I expect my army group to act as it did in Poland and the West.’ Geyer understood Bock’s meaning and issued a general order of the day for his divisions to press on regardless, ignoring their flanks. He recalled that it was not his job to close up with German units approaching from the north but only to gain ground. The 292nd led the drive toward Hajnówka, then on to Białowieźa, and finally Porozow. It was a painful march, sixty kilometres over sandy soil, undulating terrain, and along narrow waterlogged roads.
By 25 June the 292nd had made deep inroads into the forest but its rear echelons were under constant enemy fire from all sides. Geyer recalled it was not very pleasant, it sapped the energy of the troops and wasted time. It was difficult to establish command and control or conduct supply. The following day, the 292nd was still fighting its way through the forest to reach the advance units of the Ninth Army and close the pincers around Bialystok. The signals problems continued to hinder the 292nd as it struggled through the forest. Three days later on 28 June Geyer decided to visit the division to clarify the situation because of the ongoing signals problems. Its losses were mounting, during the period 22–24 June 250 men had been killed while in the period 25–28 June 300 men were killed (there was no reference to Soviet casualties). By the sixth day of the campaign, the Corps had advanced 150 kilometres east of the River Bug. An Order of the Day (2 July 1941) referred to the advance through Białowieźa:
We had to deal with eight complete divisions (two tank divisions) and parts from ten other divisions. Up to the evening of 1 July, we captured 27,000 men. The bloody losses of the Russians were very high. … Huge stores of fuel, rations and equipment of all kind were captured in Bocki, Bielsk, Hajnówka, Wolkowysk and Cholstowo.24
The Fourth Army finally joined the encirclement of Bialystok, and IX Corps continued to advance to close up with other German forces.
In 1962 the old comrades’ association of the 137th Infantry Division compiled a unit history that included anecdotes from the Barbarossa campaign. Wilhelm Meyer-Detring, by then a corps commander in the post-war Bundeswehr, had been a staff officer with the division in 1941. He recalled Geyer was from the old school officer class, but constantly pressed his men to achieve their objectives. Their regiments were forced to skirt through the western edge of the forest. The troops were anxious in the face of a swamp, sand, Urwald, poor roads and Russian snipers. Meyer-Detring complained that the Germans, unlike the Soviets, had not been trained to fight in such forests. On 25 June the 449th Infantry Regiment met stiff resistance on the western edge of the forest. Both the advance guard and mounted reconnaissance troops were reluctant to engage the Russians in a nocturnal fight inside the forest admitting, ‘they were more cautious than cavalry should be’. They waited until dawn and pressed forward only to find the Russians had already withdrawn. They pressed on and reached the main Bialystok road the evening of 26 June but were in a difficult situation. The divisional signals kept in contact with the regiment through its 100watt receivers handling over a hundred coded messages to maintain contact and press the advance. A corporal of ammunition supplies recalled an incident when a horse and cart became stuck in swamp mud. The horse’s hind legs sunk into the deep thick mud just as the divisional commanding general arrived. A senior NCO was beating the horse so hard that deep red marks were cut into its hindquarters. The corporal pushed the NCO into the mud just in time for General Bergmann to witness the scene. Bergmann ordered the muddied NCO to stop beating the horse and told the corporal off for pushing the NCO. He then ordered the cart unloaded of its cases of hand grenades each weighing fifty kilos and the troops to carry the boxes two hundred meters to dry ground. The corporal recalled the general carrying a case of grenades, and that image remained with him long after the war.25
To the south of the forest and IX Corps, Colonel General Heinz Guderian’s Panzergruppe 2 crossed the River Bug unmolested and began striking out through Red Army territory. However, upon reaching Pruzhany on the first day his 18th Panzer Division suddenly became locked in a tank battle. To the south, the Red Army also put up a bitterr resistance in Brest Litovsk’s fortress that denied Guderian the use of road and rail communications. He also experienced stiff Red Army resistance first hand on 25 June when he was forced to seek shelter as two Russian tanks broke cover and turned on a German supply road. Guderian received orders to assist in preventing the Soviets from breaking out of Bialystok and was assigned to the Fourth Army. He was not keen on the decision but pressed his senior commanders with the same energy as Geyer. The XXIV Corps commanded by General of Panzer Geyr von Schweppenburg was moving forward supporting Guderian’s attack on Bobruisk. Guderian recalled that Schweppenburg’s corps headquarters was set up in a castle once owned by the Radziwiłł family, one of the grand old families of Eastern Europe. The soldiers found a photograph of a hunting party with Wilhelm II.26 One of Schweppenburg’s formations was the 1st Cavalry Division, under General of Cavalry Kurt Feldt, advancing towards the Kobryn-Beresa-Kartuska road. By 28 June it was located in the Drohiczyn area. The cavalry was given the order to clear the area of the Pripet marshes of Red Army forces.27 Among the cavalry’s advance, in the Pripet marshes on the southern flank, was Artillery Captain (reserve) Walter Frevert leading his mounted batteries forward.
The lead formations of IX Corps had moved out of the forest by 27 June. David Glantz noted that Army Group Centre ‘had accomplished this classical pattern of destructive manoeuvre brilliantly during the battles of Belostok and Minsk, by doing so, liquidating the western front’s first echelon armies and savaging the Stavka’s first strategic echelons whose mission was to defend the border region.’28 The histories of Barbarossa, however, do not take proper account of the heavy fighting that continued in the rear areas after the frontlines had shifted eastwards. Deep inside the German rear area, there were still large numbers of Red Army forces putting up stiff resistance. The task of mopping up Białowieźa was given to General of Infantry Hans-Gustav Felber’s XIII Corps.29 The XIII Corps had three infantry divisions: 17th, 78th and 87th.30 The job of clearing the forest was assigned to General of Artillery Curt Gallenkamp commander of the 78th Infantry Division,31 which ‘distinguished itself in the battles of Białowieźa …’32 The stiff Red Army resistance forced the Corps to push more troops vicious fighting left a deep scar on German memories.33
The Corps published an account of its Barbarossa experience in 1942, including deeds of valour in Białowieźa. The operations covered the period 29–30 June 1941 and the account opened with a description of the situation:
[T]he forest of Bialowies is wonderful. Huge beech trees, ancient oaks, a lot of thickets, making the forest a paradise for hunters. A few poor settlements exist along its border areas. A single road leads through it. This road is surrounded by the green twilight of the primaeval forest, with huge trees, which are hundreds of years old. Reichsmarschall Göring went hunting together with Marshall Pilsudski here. There is still large numbers of noble game and the last remaining bison. They live in the swamp area, in the alder tree thicket, which appears to be impenetrable.34
The hunting clichés turned into typical heroic pathos: ‘Now another hunt started in the Bialowies Urwald.’ Strong Red Army forces concentrated deep inside the forest and settled into a stubborn pattern of resistance. German intelligence identified the Red Army’s 4th Tank Division, fully intact, as the main opposition.35 The fighting turned into a confusion of conventional warfare of open-ended encirclements, and ‘shoot n’ skoot’ tactics. The Russians dispersed during the day and concentrated at night. Snipers picked off German messengers or signallers attempting to lay telephone cables. The Russians replaced their supply through scavenging or turning around discarded weapons including artillery pieces, machine guns, flak artillery, and tanks to sustain the fight. They formed a formidable array of ad hoc fighting units. The Germans vilified the Red Army soldiers as ‘communistic fanatics, who bullied their men to fight on regardless of their losses and their shortages and supply difficulties.’ The corps was ordered to ‘smoke out this nest’ from an area roughly estimated at eighty-five kilometres long and thirty-five kilometres wide.
The Germans could not identify the precise positions of the Russians but suspected they were somewhere to the north. Gallenkamp ordered his troops to march through the forest towards Rudnia, and occupy security positions of the forest’s northern border. He planned an encircling drive to push the Russians out and press them against German fixed positions. The divisional plan included placing a tactical command post in the town of Popielewo. Two infantry regiments the 195th (on the left facing north) and 215th (on the right flank facing north) were assigned to secure the town. The second and third battalions of the 215th Infantry Regiment were to lead the main attack forming a left hook coming around and behind the Russians. The 195th was to drive northwards expecting to close the encirclement of the Russians in an area north of Popielewo.36
From the beginning the Germans found themselves at a disadvantage Vorkommando (advanced guard) of the divisional staff came under artillery fire while advancing into Popielewo. The Russians opened fire on the Germans from houses. Then a German reconnaissance report identified strong enemy forces concentrated to the east and south of Popielewo.37 The Germans assumed this to be difficult if not impassable terrain within extensive marshland. Supported by artillery, machine guns, and tanks, however, the Russians mounted a surprise attack launched from the marshland terrain. They battled their way into Popielewo and came face-to-face with advanced units of the 215th Infantry Regiment. Irrespective of local Russian superiority the Germans held their ground in a tenacious defence with artillery, infantry and anti-tank troops deployed to enfilade the Russian attacks.
The situation became precarious as the Germans accused the ‘Bolsheviks’ of underhand methods: ‘the vicious and sneaky tactic, of cunningly occupying a field. Many Red Army riflemen set themselves up in the treetops and trained their rifles with telescopes.’ Some Russian snipers were accused of wearing civilian clothing and shooting concentrated rifle fire into the masses of German lines. The German plan was aimed at forcing a meeting engagement to identify the Russian positions. The strength of the Russian attack turned the fighting into a ‘struggle for survival’ against ‘a near invisible enemy that clung to their piece of soil.’38 The Germans were at a disadvantage because the forest thicket made it impossible to bring down artillery or Luftwaffe close support. The desperate fighting turned into a hand-to-hand struggle or Nahkampf (close combat) with bayonets. Another German infantry battalion was ordered into the fight to sweep the Russians from the forests north of Popielewo. While another battalion, trying to turn the Russian flank, was entangled in fighting before it could jump off.
The battalion command assumed ‘both companies were advancing quite well’, but the Russians watched and waited. The sixth infantry company, from that battalion, crawled alongside the edge of a wood through tracks in the thickets and beside a stream. The fifth, from the same battalion, seemed to move through the wood on the right flank. At the moment the Germans assumed the Russians had fled, ‘suddenly it was hell on earth’:
A hail of murderous fire was unleashed. The snipers, hidden in the treetops, again opened fire into the rear of both companies. At the same time, both companies came under fire from machine guns, artillery and flak guns shooting straight at them from well-camouflaged positions.39
All contact between the battalion and the companies abruptly ceased. Isolated groups of German soldiers clung to the ground under a withering hail of bullets and shells. The officer commanding the sixth company took the critical decision—he ordered his men to charge. The was a quick dash, some vicious close combat, but they captured a Russian artillery position. At 4.00 pm the remaining companies were released in an all-out assault. The counterattack broke the Russians and they scattered, disappearing into the woods. The Germans searched the area systematically: ‘Eventually some Bolshevists came out of the thicket with their hands up. The rest retreated and many more had been killed in combat.’ The fifth company was rescued and contact with the sixth company restored. The account ummarized the mopping-up process:
We walked by comrades killed in action. The Bolshevists had killed even those of our men only slightly wounded. They were inhuman and a beastly enemy that thought they could stay in the forest of Bialowies. The prisoners of war were mainly Mongols who hardly speak any Russian. They are simply instruments in the hands of their commander. The German soldier shows no mercy towards these people. This was proven by the battle for Popielewo, a small and shabby village in the large forest of Bialowies. The battle for Popielewo will remain an honourable memory in the history of this division.40
III. The Green in the ascendancy
From his mobile headquarters, Göring ordered his train to be stabled in a forest siding in Johannisburger Heide and convened a conference. On or around 1 July 1941 the hunt leadership of Göring as Jagdherr (master of the hunt), his hunt deputy Oberjägermeister Ulrich Scherping, Landjägermeister Friedrich Ostermann (senior hunt official of East Prussia) and Oberforstmeister Walter Frevert the chief game warden of Rominten Heide (and recently artillery captain) discussed the future of Białowieźa under Nazi rule. The priority was to incorporate an extended eastern frontier into Göring’s nation-building mission of the Greater German Reich. The second point was how the forest and associated economies, communities and wild game could be brought under a forestry and hunting administration. What was said and decided in the meeting is unknown, but in December 1941 Scherping published an article about Urwald Bialowies. The contents of the article are the only detailed account of the forest under the German administration during the first stage of occupation.41
Some months before Barbarossa, it is believed Göring requested the files on Białowieźa, but there is no explanation of why.42 This could have been related to the economic planning behind Barbarossa or the proceedings of Wirtschaftsstab Ost (economic staff east). Generalforstmeister Friedrich Alpers ((1901–1944), chief of the RFA, was Göring’s representative in the preparations behind the infamous hunger plan, as reported on 23 May 1941: ‘The population of this area [the forest regions] especially the urban population, will inevitably face a great famine … Many tens of millions of people will be superfluous in this area and will die or have to emigrate to Siberia.’43 On behalf of Göring’s conference, Frevert was recalled from duty with the 1st Cavalry Division and returned via Białowieźa. He reported that Białowieźa had suffered damage, but the former Tsarist’s palace, the bison compound, and the forest industries were still functional. Göring decided Scherping with the others should travel to Białowieźa and conduct a survey of the forest. The Scherping party set off in a military staff car, on 5 July, armed with machine pistols and their hunting rifles. The party included a driver and ‘R’, or Richter an ethnic German gamekeeper, according to Heinrich Rubner.44 Scherping and Richter had known each other from hunting in Białowieźa before 1939. He had escaped Soviet captivity in Bialystok and taken employment as an overseer of a mill in the Warthegau (western Poland). Richter had intimate knowledge of Białowieźa, the inhabitants, and was fluent in Russian (Belorussian dialect) and Polish which made him indispensable. The journey took them on a route, Lomza, Bielsk, Hajnówka and Białowieźa. The party travelled roads littered with the detritus of war; crosses of German dead lined the roadside, with destroyed vehicles, and abandoned Russian artillery. The party arrived in Hajnówka at dusk and were greeted by German troops. They continued to the town of Białowieźa. The 78th Infantry Division headquarters staff were stationed in the former palace and welcomed Scherping’s party.45
Scherping’s article then described his horror at the racial degeneration destroying Białowieźa. He accused every village or settlement of scaping away at the forest through their subsistence lifestyles. The settlement had caused damage before the war and he noted, ‘The forest people were already fully occupied with their usual work and the clean-up of war damage.’ The party counted more than a hundred villages and settlements. Many settlements were on the land of poor soil which forced villagers, ‘to plunder the forest for their livelihood. They didn’t care whether it was right or wrong to steal wood from a state reservation.’ Scherping described how villager’s, when they required space, cleared an area of forest and when they need food, set traps and shot game. A major concern was how domestic animals were allowed to roam the forest, they caused extensive damage to nursery trees, and destroyed natural rejuvenation. Scherping judged the ‘forest people’ brought no added value, and ‘the inhabitants breed like rabbits’.46
Scherping’s racial profiling was scathing about the Poles and Russians, calling them all thieves. The small settlements were known to be disrespectful toward the property of the state. Scherping believed the inhabitants were notorious criminals, all murderers, bandit leaders and poachers. Ironically, he contrasted: ‘the living area of the criminal had become too small beside the living area of the game’. This was Nazi rhetoric for isolating anti-social elements. The evidence came from routine searches of the settlements where the ‘criminals’, mostly professional poachers resided. During the searches, the party received oral evidence from unnamed locals, who expressed deep loathing for the Jews and Soviet commissars. Scherping levelled his venom against the Jews and Bolsheviks. ‘The Jews, if not employed in workgroups doing something useful, gather in crowds in the towns.’ Białowieźa, Narewka Mala and Narew were identified as centres of ‘the worst and lowest kinds of Jews.’ Scherping vilified them as vermin: ‘Their looks and filth can only be compared with rats.’ This racist polemic was intended to stir up tension among the Wild und Hund readership:
The Bolshevist in his childish naivety about matters of human existence is the most devious and most vulgar criminal. It was simply unimaginable what the Bolshevist system, the devil’s own invention, has done to the Russian people over a quarter of a century. Jews and commissars, usually one of the same, have initiated Zersetzung (subversion) and have resisted any sense of order in Białowieźa.47
This narrative reinforced why it was critical to remove the Jews and Communists: ‘so long as they lived in the villages and settlements, they were the cause of passive resistance, strikes, acts of sabotage, and other problems.’ Once the ‘subversive elements’ were removed, Scherping promised normality would return to the forest. He claimed the Germans received ‘sufficient assistance’ from ‘orderly locals’ to combat subversives and removing Jews. He discussed the severity of fighting and the Red Army had not buried their dead and they ‘littered the forest’. The stench of death, especially in the heat and humidity of summer, was overwhelming. The Jews were forced to work on the clean-up, ‘it took us weeks, together with the Semitic inhabitants of the forest, to restore order and fresh air again.’ Scherping led his readers into the vilification of the Jews but did not inform them of the killings.
Accounts of the mass killings, during July–August 1941, come from multiple sources. After the 78th Infantry Division moved out, responsibility for the area passed to the 221st Security Division stationed in Bialystok. On 6 July the division initiated security operations in the Bialystok and Białowieźa area. The mission was ‘to secure two major highways and to pacify the area of Bialystok and Białowieźa forest so that Reich Marshal Göring could convert the forest into a game park’.48 On 8 July, the diary of the 221st Security Division noted that mopping operations in Białowieźa were increasingly hazardous because the local Jews supported the partisan bands.49 On the same day Major Karl Haupt, the division’s operations officer, ordered: ‘The immediate and complete evacuation of all male Jews from the villages north of Białowieźa has therefore been ordered.’50 There is evidence that locals denounced Red Army stragglers and Soviet functionaries in hiding. Another report noted how the Division made Jews ‘toil in the mid-summer heat improving roads.’51 In his diary for the 14 July, SS-Gruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski recorded discussions with General Max von Schenckendorff and confirmed receipt of ‘Generalforstmeisters’ Göring’s’ order to clear the forest. The contents of Göring’s order remain unknown. Bach-Zelewski lampooned Göring as a mere forestry general, but he might have confused him with Alpers. Then on 30 July, Bach-Zelewski received a Fieseler Storch reconnaissance aeroplane from Göring’s Luftwaffe. This kind of benefit was granted to few army commanders and reflected the importance Göring and the Nazi leadership placed in Bach-Zelewski’s mission.52
Bach-Zelewski’s diary also noted his primary responsibility was securing Rollbahn I. The Rollbahnen were improvised strategic roads that the German Army depended upon for their logistics.53 Rollbahn I was the major supply and lines of communication highway for Army Group Centre. The route of Rollbahn I eastwards followed in an arc through Brest-Kobrin-Bereza-Baranowicze-Minsk-Orsa-Smolensk. Feeder roads, running along a north/south axis, which connected to the east-west central highway. A typical feeder was the Bialystok-Hajnówka-Białowieźa-Prużany road that connected with Rollbahn 1 at Bereza. The road opened between Pruzhany and Białowieźa in 190354 and continued north to Bialystok and Königsberg. This became the main highway for the Nazi administration connecting East Prussia with Ukraine.55 Bach-Zelewski began resettlement actions against the forest communities in the vicinity of the transport system. He followed military occupation regulations: villages close to railways were routinely placed under martial law or even cleared. A second road, south-east from Bialystok, skirted the northern and eastern edge of the forest in parallel with the railway line to Baranowicze. The Imperial Russian railways constructed the Brest-Moscow line in 1861 as part of the main Moscow-Warsaw railway line. Both railway depots, in Hajnówka and Narewka Mala, became essential to the strategic railway network installations in the Białowieźa area. These networks were the core of the Wehrmacht’s strategic transportation system, and Białowieźa was a central hub for the military operations. The geopolitical-environmental duality of Białowieźa, under Nazi occupation, later caused turf wars and rivalries.
The SS-Police documentation detailed the next stage in the occupation. Several police battalions had piggybacked on the 221st Security Division as it arrived in Bialystok. Their job was to initiate SS-Police actions, in the wake of the Wehrmacht, and as a precursor to turning over the area to the civil administration.56 Police Battalion (PB) 309 raised in Cologne in September 1940 was assigned to follow the 221st Security Division into Bialystok.57 The city was barely under German occupation on 27 June when PB 309 became embroiled in an alcohol induced killing spree. Upwards of 3,000 Jews (men, women and children) were slaughtered in extreme acts of savagery, culminating with hundreds of Jews being locked in the Great Synagogue and burned alive.58 On 3 July, PB 309 were ordered to collect, and stockpile captured Russian weapons in the Stoczek and Białowieźa areas. The following day it led 150 Jews on a work detail to clean up the Pruzhany road and was also involved in a cleansing action in the Chwojnik area. According to Peter Longerich, on 8 July Himmler ordered his SS-Police troops to treat every Jew as a partisan. Then on 11 July, the senior police formation in the sector (Polizeiregiments Mitte) issued a general order to its three PBs (307th, 316th and 322nd) to shoot all Jewish males aged 17–45 under arrest for looting.59 The arrival of Police Bicycle Battalion 322 initiated a change of modus operandi. This battalion was mustered in Vienna in April 1941, served in Warsaw, and was ordered east cycling ninety-four kilometres on paved roads. Over the period 10–14 July, the war diary recorded killing seventy-one Jews and two Red Army PoW’s. This battalion briefly served as guard of Dulag 185 (prison camp) and shot five Jews ‘while trying to escape’. Then it participated in searches of Bialystok’s Jewish quarter. From 19–21 July, the PB 322 transferred to Bereza on Rollbahn I for transport security duties.
On 23 July 1941, Polizeiregiments Mitte issued further instructions about the forest’s inhabitants. The order explained that all locals (excluding Jews) were friendly and should be treated correctly. The locals had been ‘patient’ during searches and had remained ‘nice’ even when contraband was removed from their homes. Many locals accepted paid work for the Germans. The instructions were followed by an order from OKW, recorded in PB 322’s war diary, regarding the burial of the Russian dead.60 The burial process did not allow priests or any religious service and denied any salutes or decorations. This was justified on the grounds of Soviet war crimes, the order alleged they had used illegal ‘dum-dum’ bullets. The police diary referred to difficult internal issues, including signals problems and insufficient sanitary facilities for the ninth company. They were not allocated showers until they arrived in Baranowicze (Baranovichi: Belarus). GIS Map 4 illustrates the area of deportations in the northwest corner of the forest. This area contained the highest concentration of Jews in the forest and in particular the town of Narewka Mala.
GIS Map 4: Police Battalion 322—the village deportations 25 July–15 August 1941
The map was generated from the diary in PB 322’s war diary. The layers were drawn from specific locations in the diary, as well as Scherping’s article and Bech-Zelewski’s diary. The concentrations reflected the area covered by Scherping’s party.
Deportations from Białowieźa started on 25 July 1941 (GIS Map 4). Bach-Zelewski issued a proclamation, posted in each town centre for persons bound for deportation. Every inhabitant brought their property on carts; they had two hours to pack; there was a warning if the people returned, they would face capital punishment; they had to leave behind all tools, and cattle.61 PB 322 began deporting people from villages from ten kilometres northwest of Białowieźa town (see map 4). The police used twenty-four trucks to deport 921 persons (103 families) and transported them to villages eleven kilometres beyond the forest border. Nothing is known about how these people were received, housed or integrated into these villages. The next day 200 families (1,210 people) were deported from villages fifteen kilometres northeast of Białowieźa. They were transported forty-five kilometres northeast to Laski (a common village name in that region). During the process, they shot a communist and a ‘Jew for plunder’. On 27 July the police burned down the empty villages. The following day they deported 160 families (945 persons) from villages twenty kilometres northeast of Białowieźa. On 29 July they deported a hundred families (570 persons) from villages also twenty kilometres northeast of Białowieźa. They transported the people to the Porosow area. The next day they deported 1,135 persons (320 families) from villages eighteen kilometres north of Białowieźa to Sabludow about fifty kilometres to the northwest.62
A report from the third company’s diary (PB 322) described how the deportations were conducted, and official photographers were on hand to record the process (note the illustrations). The company removed people from Zabrody, using twenty-eight horse-drawn carts to convey fifteen families, a total of a hundred people. They also carried people from Lesna, with sixty-six horse-drawn carts conveying thirty families, a total of 180 persons. The diary recorded four families of twenty-eight persons had departed the day before, indicating the police were not restricting all movements to set schedules. The police report explained their lorries were being maintained and could not be used. The carts were loaded with pregnant and old women, old men and children. They took along seventy-two cattle but handed over twenty-three cows, forty-four calves and forty-four horses to the Germans. The people were warned if they returned, they would face a death sentence. The carts were formed into a column and led away with the last gone by 10.30 am. The company commander reported the shooting of two communists. The company remained in Lesna overnight before moving on. They deported 1,619 persons from twelve villages in the Narewka Mala area on 31 July. The deportees were taken fifty kilometres beyond forest borders. The total deportations for the period 24–31 July was 6,446 persons and thirty-four villages destroyed.63
In Berlin in the early evening of 31 July 1941, Reinhard Heydrich (Himmler’s deputy) presented Göring with a letter for official signature. The appointment in Göring’s diary was marked with “Heydrich” 18.15–19.15hrs, and the letter stated:
To supplement the task that was assigned to you on 24 January 1939, which dealt with the solution of the Jewish problem by emigration and evacuation in the most suitable way. I hereby charge you with making all necessary preparations with regard to organisational, technical and material matters for bringing about a complete solution of the Jewish question within the German sphere of influence in Europe. Wherever other governmental agencies are involved, these are to cooperate with you. I request you further to send me, in the near future, an overall plan covering the organisational, technical and material measures necessary for the accomplishment of the final solution of the Jewish question which we desire.64
The letter was Göring’s direct culpability to the Holocaust. Many Holocaust scholars regard this as the key document that led to the ‘final solution’ of the extermination of European Jewry. In his masterwork, Raul Hilberg explained that the letter granted Heydrich a ‘mandate’ for the extermination process.65 Adolf Eichmann’s prison confession included a reference to the paragraphs he drafted that Göring signed.66 Peter Longerich in The Unwritten Order (2002) reduced the letter’s importance and linked it to a more important draft from March 1941. In that version, Göring requested an amendment to include the territories planned to fall under Alfred Rosenberg’s civilian administration of Soviet Russia and Ukraine. In a subsequent study, Longerich explained that Göring’s amendment included Rosenberg’s territory indicating the ‘final solution’ was planned for the east.67 In Saul Friedländer’s opinion, the letter sealed Himmler and Heydrich’s authority over the Jewish question.68 Mark Roseman connected the letter to an earlier order by Göring to Heydrich to form the Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration in 1939. The 1941 letter was an extension of the mandate leading to the infamous Wannsee Conference.69 Christopher Browning initially agreed with Longerich over the March 1941 draft which Göring agreed in principle, but then required the amendment.70 Browning later argued that the final document was the go-ahead to prepare a ‘feasibility study’ for mass extermination. He added that Heydrich required the document because ‘he now faced a new and awesome task that would dwarf even the systematic murder program emerging on Soviet territory.’71 Another explanation was how the letter granted official approval, even in the illogical polycracy of the Third Reich. On 10 February 1941, Göring became vice-chancellor of Germany, or deputy Führer, and in that capacity, his signature represented the state approval for Himmler and Heydrich to proceed.
Probably coincidental to the Göring-Heydrich letter, but the next day (1 August) Scherping met with Bach-Zelewski in Białowieźa—a critical meeting of perpetrators. The only record of the meeting is a PB 322 war diary entry. The detail confirmed the meeting, in Białowieźa, and the agreement to shoot seventy-two locals. We can assume with certainty that this killing action signified the Scherping’s party pivotal role in the police killing actions, because they knew the locations of the Jews and Communists. From Bach-Zelewski’s perspective, his war diary is highly reliable on his military activities, but woefully unreliable regarding the Holocaust. His diary has no reference to the meeting on 1 August, but there are indications of his presence in a busy travel schedule (see table 1). The Fiesler Storch enabled Bach-Zelewski to keep constant track of the killing process. It also meant he could coordinate the assault against the Jews across the entire rear area of Army Group C. Apart from Minsk and Mogilev, his two visits of Białowieźa were significant markers in the killing period. The schedule highlights his centrality to the killing process and the importance Białowieźa.
Table 1: Bach-Zelewski’s travel itinerary
| July | Aug | Sept | Oct | Nov | |||||
| 1 | Bialystok | 1 | Białowieźa | ||||||
| 8 | Warsaw | 2 | Pripet | 3 | Minsk | 4 | Vitebsk | 5 | Mogilev |
| 10 | Bialystok | 10 | Baranowicze | 5 | Turov | 5 | Toropets | 9 | Mogilev |
| 12 | Grodno | 14 | Minsk | 6 | Minsk | 6 | Mogilev | 12 | Smolensk |
| 18 | Pripyet | 17 | Breslau | 8 | Mosyr | 13 | Sick–Mogilev | 13 | Berlin |
| 30 | Receives Storch | 19 | Baranowicze | 13 | Choiniki | 14 | Sick | 14 | Breslau |
| 31 | HSSPF staff | 20 | Turov | 16 | Mogilev | 16 | Toropets | 18 | Berlin |
| still in Breslau | 22 | Starye Dorogi | 17 | Smolensk | 17 | Cholm | 27 | Warsaw | |
| 23 | Pinsk | 24–26 | Training | 18 | Vitebsk | 28 | Mogilev | ||
| 24 | Baranowice | 29 | Pripet | 27 | Mogilev | 30 | Smolensk | ||
| 25 | Białowieźa | 30 | Riga | ||||||
| 26 | Mogilev | ||||||||
| 27 | Starobin | ||||||||
| 30 | Minsk |
PB 322’s war diary and supplementary correspondence recorded a period of sustained killings. On 2 August, seventy-two people (including five Jews and six women) were rounded up and shot. They also included nineteen persons having been arrested for participating in an illegal labour action in a factory in Hajnówka.72 Among the diary’s papers, there is a ‘daily report’ that temized third company from the assembly at 3.00 am in Białowieźa to the ‘blitz’ hunt for communists forty minutes later. They searched houses, arrested people, and took prisoners to a collection camp under the command of Order Police Lieutenant Giebner, who was part of the local garrison. The company arrested four Poles, eleven Byelorussian men, three Byelorussian females, six male Jews and a Jewish woman. They were searched and the Jews were accused of holding occupation money vouchers, which the Germans confiscated. The second company, from the PB 322, rounded up more prisoners. The Germans shot all of them and the final report confirmed no one had tried to escape.73 Writing later, Kossak claimed Scherping had handed a letter to the SS identifying the persons he wanted to be arrested and shot, but this may be based on rumour.74 Interestingly, on 3 August the commander of PB 322, recorded receipt of correspondence from Scherping which was passed on to Polizei-Regiment Mitte that confirming actions taken but there is no known copy of the letter.75
The remaining companies PB 322 departed from Bezirk Bialystok, on 4 August, but the third rifle company remained behind in Białowieźa. The company wholly relied on Scherping and Frevert to complete the mission. On 4 August, the third company executed those persons arrested on 2 August. The company then literally worked through the Bodbiala area killing fifty-one men and three women. On 8 August they shot another nineteen people. All male Jews, aged 16–45, were rounded up on 9 August, and the next day seventy-seven persons were killed in Białowieźa prison camp (location unknown). Some photographic evidence indicates the police adopted the ‘sardine packing’ killing method. The victims were made to lay face down in a long ditch as the police fired a single shot to the back of their necks. The next group of victims were made to lie on the dead bodies and were then shot. This continued until all were dead. There were several shootings on 11 August, including a Jewish man and two ‘Belorussian plunderers’. Third company and army troops were ordered to participate in a fruitless action to hunt for ‘bandits’ on 14 August. The order came from Kreiskommandantur Pruzhany (district level garrison) and took place east of Białowieźa near Suchopol. A daily report excused their failure for starting too late, and then the police regiment commander ordered it halted.76 On 14 August 1941, Göring was overheard saying there would be a great loss of life through a lack of nutrition in the east and added, ‘the Jews in the territories dominated by Germany had nothing more to seek.’77
Goring’s timing preceded events in Białowieźa by just twenty hours. The third company conducted a Judenaktion (Jew action) in Narewka Mala, on 15 August. They corralled 282 Jewish males (aged 16 to 65) and a Pole. Their families (259 women and 162 children) were immediately taken to a holding facility in Kobryn (Belarus) about 90 kilometres away. The men were forced to walk 2 kilometres through the high street, a public display of degradation, and led to a remote place beside a railway line. They crossed the line and made to dig ditches in the axis of a second branch line were shot. There are no precise details of the killings, but the task was completed by the end of the day. Christopher Browning described the scenes of a police company conducting a mass shooting. The process included the identification of a remote site, digging mass grave pits in advance, bringing the Jews to the place of execution, and forcing them to disrobe. Browning noted there was the consumption of alcohol by the troops, with as many as twenty per cent trying to avoid the shooting by doing ‘other’ duties. The NCOs walked around selecting firing squads of eight to ten men. Small groups of Jews were then made to run through a police cordon of about thirty metres to the pits where they were lined up and shot. The rotation between firing squads was kept to five or six shots per man. Based upon Browning’s findings the shootings were normally completed in three hours.78 After the killings, the police held a convivial campfire party with beer and beef on the roast.79 On 18 August, the third company conducted a ‘communist hunt’ and accounted for twenty-six shot dead.80 The last daily report by the third company was issued on 19 August when they departed from their strongpoints in Olschewka, Skubewo, Masiewo I and Chichowola handing over duties to the second company of PB 323.81 Today the site of the Narewka Mala killings is remote but there is a monument above the mass grave, incorrectly dated 5 August 1941, and the area has been largely planted over with pine trees. The destruction of the Jewish community marked the end of a two-hundred-year Białowieźa history.
IV. A cultural synopsis of genocide
The journey from Rominten’s calm diplomacy to the genocide in Białowieźa was three short years. After the outbreak of war, Henderson reflected: ‘There is no rabid nationalism in sport [hunting], or at any rate that kind of sport, nor Socialism either, in the midst of unspoilt Nature, where all men are equal. From my host downwards everyone was simple, unaffected, and extremely friendly.’ Henderson had regaled his participation in a Nazi pseudo-pagan death ceremony. He had hoodwinked himself into treating Göring and his court as ‘gentlemen’. He could fairly argue that genocide was not explicit in 1938, but there was evidence of the mounting terror against the Jews. The ritualisation of death should have been a warning even to Henderson in 1938–39. Silence in Nazi Germany was not golden. Scherping’s December 1941 article publicly announced Nazi ambitions to the German hunt and the role of the Green in genocide. Leading officials tried to maintain tight security regarding leaks. From late August 1941 British intelligence intercepts of German police signals began to decipher messages about atrocities.82 In July police signals from Bialystok requested films to ‘assist’ in their conduct of atrocities.83 Another decrypt had identified and confirmed: ‘Pol.batl.309, based on Stozcek near Białowieźa, has had similar work in the woods around the latter.’ In the same decrypt, the British noted: ‘Pol.batl.322 is to see an evacuation of the population from Białowieźa.’84 On 17 August PB 323 arrived in Białowieźa from Tilsit in East Prussia. This concluded PB 322’s assignment in the forest. The transfer was identified in another British decrypt although incomplete it stated: ‘… both Białowieźa and Bialystok are being reinforced: Pol.Batl. 323 arrives at the former on 18 August 1941.’85 On 25 August Bach-Zelewski returned to Białowieźa ‘to meet with SS-Untersturmführer von Härtel (sic) to see for himself how the clearances were progressing.’ He also wanted all the horses taken from the locals to be led on a march to an SS domain in Minsk.86 In September 1941, a British Intelligence report summarised:
The execution of ‘Jews’ is so recurrent a feature of these reports that the figures have been omitted from the situation reports and brought under one heading … Whether all those executed as ‘Jews’ are indeed such is of course doubtful; but the figures are no less conclusive as evidence of a policy of savage intimidation if not of ultimate extermination.87
The events in Białowieźa in 1941, bisected theories of Imperial German colonialism and Nazi Lebensraum. In 1936, the amalgamation of the SS and the Police had brought about the Nazi police state. Under Kurt Daluege, the chief of the Ordnungspolizei, the beat police were radicalised through a crash course of militarisation.88 On 21 January 1941, Daluege spoke to the day of the Police inspectors conference. He discussed the Kolonialfrage (colonial question) still lodged in German thinking about empire. His speech referred to two SS-Police schools, Berlin-Oranienburg and Vienna (Austria). They both ran training programmes on behalf of the Colonial Police Department, within the Hauptamt (central offices) of the Ordnungspolizei. Daluege claimed he had stumbled across the Berlin Colonial School, which was a surprise since they trained annually: 600 policemen and 1,500 Beamten (officials).89 The training of the police, according to Daluege, was to transform them into the ‘best quality’ manpower; and to the shame of the older colonial powers like England’. The functions of these two colonial police schools, in April 1941, also pointed to the strategic thinking of the SS-Police about security and policing Hitler’s empire.90 The colonial police academies adapted to the guidelines for colonial military tactics that were placed on general distribution to police departments. In methodology, the preferred skills were simplistic—adopt silence, march with care, and attack the enemy with skill. There was a racial tone injected into colonial lectures: ‘racialism is strongly represented in Judaism’. Colonial warfare was reframed to fit Nazi war-making: ‘The aim of the fighting in this war, in the west the destruction of their [allies] abilities to continue fighting, but the war against Bolshevism is their destruction per se.’91 This chapter has shown how ‘the Green’ revelled in its invented rituals and exploited them to bamboozle foreign diplomats. The rituals emboldened the RFA to navigate genocide. ‘The Green’ killed Jews like vermin and was akin to the gamekeeper’s modus operandi. This was the end of the first stage of radicalisation, there could be no going back, and events will show how it worsened.
Image 7: Sites of memory—Located beside the railway in Zabłotczyzna (2 miles from Narewka), the memorial refers to approximately 500 Jews killed on 5 August 1941. The German records show 282 Jewish men were killed at that place on 15 August 1941.
Visitors to the site have included relatives of victims: https://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/Narewka/HolocaustMemorials.html
Source: Author, 2013
1 Schama, Landscape and Memory, p. 67. Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life, (London, 1987).
2 Simona Kossak, The Białowieźa Saga, (Warsaw, 2001), pp. 445–448.
3 Gautschi, Der Reichsjägermeister, p. 84.
4 Richard Overy, Goering, (London, 1984), p. 81, 89, 100.
5 Werner Beumelburg, Kampf um Spanien: Die Geschichte Der Legion Condor, (Berlin, 1939).
6 Peter Neville, “The Appointment of Sir Nevile Henderson, 1937—Design or Blunder?”, Journal of Contemporary History, London: Sage Publications, Vol 33(4), 1988, 609–619. Peter Neville, Appeasing Hitler: The Diplomacy of Sir Nevile Henderson, 1937–39, (London, 2000).
7 Sir Nevile Henderson, Failure of A Mission: Berlin 1937–9. (London, 1940), p. 89.
8 Ibid., p. 90–1.
9 Ibid., p. 80.
10 Halik Kochanski, The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War, (Cambridge, 2012), p. 59
11 BArch, Lw. Personalakte, Erich Weinreis.
12 Kossak, Białowieźa Forest Saga, p. 462.
13 Waldemar Monkiewicz, Bialowieźa w cieniu swastyki, (Bialystok, 1984), p. 36.
14 Czesław Madajczyk, Die Okkupationspolitik Nazideutschlands in Polen 1939–1945, (Berlin, 1988), p. 143.
15 Jan Tomasz Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia, (Princeton, 2002). p. 4.
16 Ibid., p. 35–38. See also Kossak, Białowieźa Forest Saga, p. 463.
17 Ibid., pp. 50–68.
18 Ibid., pp. 126–179. Gross had originally presented figures of one million deported and 400,000 arrested.
19 Daniel Boćkowski, Białostocczyna w radzieckiej polityce okupacyjnej 1939–1944, (Lublin, 2005).
20 Kossak, Białowieźa Forest Saga, pp. 463–466. Kossak provides no record of how many people returned, although her account does include subsequent testimonies by victims.
21 The search for archival evidence included a visit to NARA’s microfilm collection of records of German field commands and corps compiled under finding guide 55 for IX Armeekoprs. Microfilm series T314/404-8 were examined but with no results to explain the Corps’ drive through the forest.
22 Horst Boog et al, trans. Ewald Osers, Germany and the Second World War: Volume IV The Attack on the Soviet Union, (Oxford, 1998), p. 528.
23 Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: The Red Army 1939–1945, (London, 2010), pp. 144–147.
24 Herrmann Geyer, Das IX Korps im Ostfeldzug, (Vowinckel, 1969), pp. 10–92. Wilhelm Meyer-Detring had an original draft after Geyer committed suicide in 1946 and wrote the book’s foreword. The Red Army units were the equivalent in size to a German division.
25 Wilhelm Meyer-Detring, Die 137. Infanterie-Division im Mittelabschnitt der Ostfront, (Eggolsheim, 2006), pp. 24–25. The original was published by the old comrade’s association that was called Divisionskameradschaft General Bergmann (137. I.D.). Bergmann was killed in action on 21 December 1942.
26 Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader, trans. Constantine Fitzgibbon, (Aylesbury, 1974), pp. 152–160.
27 Boog et al, The Attack on the Soviet Union, p. 526.
28 David M. Glantz, Barbarossa Derailed: The Battle for Smolensk, the Encirclement Battle, and the First and Second Soviet Counteroffensives, 10 July–10 September 1941, (Solihull, 2010), p. 39.
29 Felber was born in July 1889 in Wiesbaden, had been a soldier since 1908. In 1940, he was promoted to General of Infantry after the French campaign. Felber took command of the corps in October 1940. He served throughout the war and died in 1962.
30 W. Borcher, ‘Der Todeswald von Bialowieza’, Der Landser, (1961). In August 2009, I received a copy of this pulp pamphlet before a visit to Białowieźa. The content traced the events and places in close detail.
31 Ludwig Merker, Die 78. Infanterie- und Sturm-Division 1938–1945, (Berlin, 1981). Gallenkamp (1890–1958) received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. After the war, he was found guilty of war crimes against British and American servicemen. He was released from prison in 1952.
32 Samuel W. Mitcham, Hitler’s Legions, (London, 1985), p. 96.
33 Fritz Vetter, Die 78. Infanterie und Sturm-Division 1938–1945: Eine Dokumentation in Bildern, (Bad Nauheim, 1981), p. 37.
34 Generalkommando des XIII. Armeekorps, An Der Mittleren Ostfront: Ein Deutsches Korps im Kampf gegen die Sowjets, (Nürnberg, 1942), pp. 25–8.
35 Ibid.
36 Vetter, Die 78. Infanterie, p. 37.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., Armeekorps, p. 26.
39 Ibid., Armeekorps, p. 27.
40 Ibid., p. 28.
41 Scherping, ‘Bialowies wieder in Deutscher Verwaltung’, pp. 317–325. See also Gautschi, Frevert, p. 78.
42 Thaddeus Sunseri, ‘Exploiting the Urwald: German Post-Colonial Forestry in Poland and Central Africa, 1900–1960,’ Past & Present, Vol.214, Issue 1, February 2012, pp. 305–342, and in particular p. 336.
43 Christopher Browning, ‘A reply to Martin Broszat Regarding the Origins of the Final Solution, in Michael Marrus (ed), The Nazi Holocaust: Historical Articles on the Destruction of the European Jews, vol.3, (Meckler, 1989), pp. 168–87; see also the original “Zur Genesis der Endlösung.’ Eine Antwort an Martin Broszat.” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 25(4), 1984, pp. 739–775.
44 Heinrich Rubner, Deutsche Forstgeschichte 1933–1945. Forstwirtschaft, Jagd und Umwelt im NS-Staat, (St.Katharinen, 1997), p. 193.
45 Scherping, ‘Bialowies wieder in Deutscher Verwaltung’, pp. 317–325.
46 Ibid., pp. 317–325.
47 Ibid.
48 Ben Shepherd, War In The Wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans, (Cambridge Mass., 2004), p. 61.
49 Hannes Heer & Klaus Naumann, War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II 1941–1945, (Oxford, 1995), p. 65.
50 Ibid., pp. 65–66.
51 Ibid., p. 65.
52 BArch, R 20/45b Kriegstagebuch von dem Bach, 14 July 1941, p 4. Bach-Zelewski changed his name many times during his lifetime, mostly to fit the governing political situation. During Barbarossa, he was known as Erich von dem Bach having dropped the ‘Zelewski’ part to suit SS sensitivities over his Slavic heritage.
53 Anthony Clayton, Warfare in Woods and Forests, (Bloomington, 2012), pp. 102–3.
54 Małgorzata Krasińska & Zbignew A. Krasińska, European Bison: The Nature Monograph, (Białowieźa, 2004), p. 68.
55 Andrej Angrick, Martina Voigt, Silke Ammerschubert, Peter Klein, ‘Da hätte man schon ein Tagebuch führen müssen: Das Polizeibataillon 322 und die Judenmorde im Bereich der Heeresgruppe Mitte während des Sommers und Herbstes 1941’, in Helge Grabitz, Klaus Bästlein, Johannes Tuchel, Die Normalität des Verbrechens: Bilanz und Perspectiven der Forschung zu den nationalsozialistischen Gewaltverbrechen, (Berlin, 1994), pp. 332–333.
56 Philippe Burrin, Hitler and the Jews: The Genesis of the Holocaust, (London, 1994). Browning, Ordinary Men, pp. 437–8. This police regiment was assigned to Bach-Zelewski as part of the pre-Barbarossa preparations.
57 AA, 1.2.7.6. 9038100 Incarceration Documents, Notices and reports o Pol. Batl.322 Operation against Jews in Białowieźa, Bialystok, Narewka Mala.
58 Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, (Oxford, 2010), p. 203, Emil Ditlev Ingeman Kjerte, ‘A Comparative Study of the My Lai and Bialystok Massacres: The Social Mechanismsof Perpetration and their Casual Determinants’, MA Thesis, Uppsala Universitet, 2015.
59 Ibid., p. 198.
60 Kriegstagebuch Pol.Btl.322, Stichwortartiger Bericht über Einsatz des Batl. In Bialowieza, pp. 1–2. There are multiple copies of the war diary of Police Battalion 322 in circulation that have been collected by several national archives and then variously cited by scholars. For example, Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen and Volke Riess (ed), ‘The Good Old Days’: The Holocaust Through the Eyes of the Perpetrators and Bystanders, (London, 1991) referred to the BArch Ludwigsburg reference: CSSR 1, Ordner 147, whereas Christian Gerlach, in Kalkulierte Morde, referred to BA F56753 (a former Bundesarchiv reference); and Yad Vashem (Jerusalem) the reference is: 0.53—Ludwigsburg, USSR Collection, file number 86 or 127. All sources have been scrutinised in this research but for simplification and to avoid confusion the shortened German document title is adopted in this section of the book.
61 Kossak, Białowieźa Forest Saga, p. 462.
62 War diary Pol.Btl.322, Einsatz der Pol.-Batl.322 in Białowieźa Forst.
63 War diary Pol.Btl.322, Stichwortartiger Bericht über Einsatz des Batl. In Białowieźa, pp. 1–2.
64 J. Noakes & G. Pridham, (ed), Nazism 1919–1945, A Documentary Reader: 3. Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination, (Exeter, 1995), p. 1104, document 825. See also the Notizen: ‘Die Aufzeichnungen Herman Göring’s Im Institut Zeitgeschichte’, Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Jahrgang 31, (1983) Heft 2.
65 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, (New York, 1985), p. 163.
66 Raul Hilberg, Sources of Holocaust Research: An Analysis, (Chicago, 2001), p. 153.
67 Longerich, Holocaust, pp. 175–6.
68 Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945, (London, 2007), pp. 237–8.
69 Mark Roseman, The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution, (London, 2002), p. 15.
70 Christopher Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers, (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 20–21
71 Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy 1939–1942, (London, 2004), p. 353.
72 War diary Pol.Btl.322, Stichwortartiger Bericht über Einsatz des Batl. In Bialowieza, p. 2.
73 War diary, Pol.Btl.322, Tagesmeldung an Pol. Btl.322, 2 August 1941.
74 Kossak, Białowieźa Forest Saga, p. 466.
75 War diary, Pol.Btl.322, Einsatz der Pol.-Batl.322 in Bialowieza Forst.
76 War diary, Pol.Btl.322, Tagesmeldung an Pol.Btl.322, 14 August 1941.
77 On this see, Browning, ‘A reply to Martin Broszat Regarding the Origins of the Final Solution’.
78 Browning, Ordinary Men, pp. 78–87.
79 War diary, Pol.Btl.322, Tagesmeldung an Pol.Btl.322, 14 August 1941. p. 4.
80 War diary, Pol.Btl.322, Stichwortartiger Bericht über Einsatz des Batl. In Bialowies, pp. 8–9, Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, p. 562.
81 War diary, Pol.Btl.322, Tagesmeldung an Pöl. Bl. 322, 19 August 1941.
82 Richard Breitman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and American Knew, (New York, 1998).
83 TNA, HW 16/6, part one, MSGP 27, 21 August 1941, p. 2.
84 Ibid.
85 TNA, HW 16/6, part one, MSGP 28, 12 September 1941, p. 6.
86 BArch, R 20/45b Kriegstagebuch von dem Bach, 25 August 1941, p. 10. Bach-Zelewski misspelt von Hertel’s name. Hertel was the commander of the third company.
87 TNA, HW 16/6, part one, British decrypts of German police signals covering period 15–31 August 1941 General situation assessment.
88 Philip W. Blood, ’Kurt Daluege and the Militarisation of the Ordnungspolizei’, in Gerard Oram, Conflict and Legality: Policing Mid-Twentieth Century Europe, (London, 2003), pp. 95–120.
89 NARA, T580/216/0473. Ansprache des Chefs der Ordnungspolizei anläßlich der Tagung der Inspekteure der Ordunungspolizei am 21. Januar 1941, 24.
90 NARA, T175/13/2515813-2515890, Die Völker der Erde.
91 NARA, T175/13/2515813-2515890, Richtlinien für die kolonialtaktische Ausbildung an den Kolonialpolizei-Schulen (n.d.).
3. Grossdeutschland
By July 1942, Białowieźa could no longer be regarded as a Green colony. In the summer of 1941, Ulrich Scherping saw the realisation of his Urwald Bialowies, through deportation and genocide; one year later that political initiative was squandered to his rivals. Göring’s ambitions, regardless of his hunting-forestry interests, remained fixated on the geopolitical priorities. Under Göring’s nationalist umbrella, the full administrative bureaucracy had descended on Bezirk Bialystok. The entire retinue of strategic, political, and cultural offices took over Białowieźa, Bialystok and East Prussia. There were also those historical echoes of former borders, which Erich Koch was determined to exploit. The Third Partition of Poland in 1795, led to Prussia’s territorial acquisition of the area around Bialystok which was briefly known as New East Prussia (1795–1806).1 During the Great War, Imperial Germany had expectations of reconstituting New East Prussia out of the occupation in which Koch had served as a soldier.2 Koch had no interest in restoring the old monarchy, but his greed was fuelled by the recent rapid growth of East Prussia. There had been a twenty-five per cent increase in East Prussia’s territorial expansion from the war including Bezirk Bialystok.3 This was largely due to his special relationship, even friendship, with Göring.
On 16 July 1941, a Hitler conference was convened to discuss the administration of the conquered territories in the east. Martin Bormann kept the minutes and wrote, ‘The Reich Marshal [Göring] thinks it was right to incorporate into East Prussia several parts of the Baltic country, e.g., the Forest of Bialystok.’4 Hitler agreed to assign Bezirk Bialystok (district of Bialystok), including Białowieźa to East Prussia. It is probable Koch, Göring and Hitler had come to a pre-conference arrangement. After the conference, Göring returned to his field headquarters in Johannisburger Heide. Lw.General Ramcke and Lw.General Student was present when Göring was greeted by Koch brandishing a map of the Bialystok region, claiming it had once belonged to East Prussia. Koch pointed to Białowieźa and Göring said, “of course East Prussia gets that too.”5 Hitler later confirmed Koch’s acquisitions in the ‘Führer decree on the Provisional Administration of Bialystok district’, which included the Ukraine.6 According to a British intelligence report, Bezirk Bialystok was placed under Koch by decree on 1 August 1941.7 Alexander Dallin thought, ‘The Bialystok district of Belorussia, Polish until 1939, was attached to East Prussia as of 15 August 1941, thus linking the latter with Ukraine.’8 Bezirk Bialystok, including Urwald Bialowies (part of the incorporation renaming of Białowieźa into German officialdom), had joined Koch’s fiefdom, stretching his geopolitical landmass from the Baltic to the Black Sea.9
German soldiers had fought and died in the East Prussia-Bialystok-Białowieźa, and this led to the assignment of military cemeteries as honoured ground. The Wehrmacht war graves commission, designated the occupied east the Wehrmacht-Gräbenoffiziere im Osten (WGO) and graves in Bezirk Bialystok became listed as WGO-36. Captain Plaumann, the local WGO officer, routinely referred to the Greater German Reich on cemetery location maps, and in all official correspondence.10 This both symbolized and confirmed the centrality of Göring’s nation-building. The defeated region had been administered by the Poles and Soviets within less than three years. There were traces of both still in the system. The prevailing jurisdiction in the Bialystok region, after the Nazi occupation, was skewed by confusion. East Prussia was the German state or Nazi Gau, but each national institution claimed self-regulation. Bezirk Bialystok came within German national laws and codes, but there were multiple interpretations of jurisdiction. There were layers of civilian administration competing with military, political and ideological organisations. Within in each organization, there were layers of bureaus, management departments or field offices. Officials were paid home salaries and received foreign service subsidies. Soldiers in the field faced dual reporting structures divided between occupation and homeland authorities.
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