War crimes of the Wehrmacht





War crimes of the Wehrmacht

During World War II, the German Wehrmacht (combined armed forces - Heer, Kriegsmarine, and Luftwaffe) committed systematic war crimes, including massacres, mass rape, looting, the exploitation of forced labor, the murder of three million Soviet prisoners of war, and participated in the extermination of Jews.

While the Nazi Party's own SS forces (in particular the SS-Totenkopfverbände, Einsatzgruppen and Waffen-SS) was the organization most responsible for the genocidal killing of the Holocaust, the regular armed forces of the Wehrmacht committed many war crimes of their own (as well as assisting the SS in theirs), particularly on the Eastern Front in the war against the Soviet Union. According to a study by Alex J. Kay and David Stahel, the majority of the Wehrmacht soldiers deployed to the Soviet Union participated in war crimes.

Creation of the WehrmachtEdit

When the Nazi Party came to power, this was welcomed by almost the entire officer corps of the Reichswehr because of the Nazis' support for Wiederwehrhaftmachung (remilitarization) of Germany, the total militarization of German society in order to ensure that Germany did not lose the next war.

As such, what both the Nazis and the German Army wanted to see was a totally militarized Volksgemeinschaft (people's community) that would be purged of perceived internal enemies like the Jews, who many believed had "stabbed Germany in the back" in 1918. The Wehrmacht was created by Adolf Hitler in 1935 with the passing of a law introducing conscription. It was composed of both volunteers and conscripts.

Many officers therefore willingly embraced National Socialist ideology in the 1930s. Acting on his own initiative, the Defence Minister Werner von Blomberg had purged the Army of all its Jewish personnel in February 1934. On December 8, 1938, the Army leadership instructed all officers to be thoroughly versed in National Socialism and to apply its values in all situations.

Starting in February 1939, pamphlets were issued that were made required reading in the Army. The content can be gauged by the titles: "The Officer and Politics", "Hitler's World Historical Mission", "The Army in the Third Reich", "The Battle for German Living Space", "Hands off Danzig!", and "The Final Solution of the Jewish Question in the Third Reich". The latter essay proclaimed:

The defensive battle against Jewry will continue, even if the last Jew has left Germany. Two big and important tasks remain: 1) the eradication of all Jewish influence, above all in the economy and in culture; 2) the battle against World Jewry, which tries to incite all people in the world against Germany.

Attitudes like these colored all of the instructions that came to Wehrmacht troops in the summer of 1939 as a way of preparing for the attack on Poland


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