Hansen - Disobeying Hitler: German resistance in the last year of WWII

1. 20. Nurembergs Destruction, Heidelbergs Salvation:
   Southern Germany
2. 22. We, the women of Freiburg, beg you:
   The French Occupation of Southern Germany
3. 26. Escaping the Soviet Net:
   Walther Wenck and the Flight across the Elbe

. Rumung des Kuban-Brckenkopf es und Verteidigung der Krim vom 4. 9. 1943, OKW/Gen St d H/Op. Abt (IS/A), September 4, 1943. Reproduced in Percy Ernst Schramm, ed., Kriegstagebuch des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht, 4 vols. (Frankfurt: Bernard & Graefe Verlag fr Wehrwesen, 1961), III(2):14556; Karl-Gnter Zelle, Hitlers zweifelnde Elite: GoebbelsGringHimmlerSpeer (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schningh, 2010), 330; Christian Hartmann, Verbrecherischer Kriegverbrecherische Wehrmacht? Vierteljahrshefte fr Zeitgeschichte 52, no. 1 (2004): 601.

. Quoted in Albert Speer, Erinnerungen (Berlin: Propylen Verlag, 1969), 412. Also see Zelle, Hitlers zweifelnde Elite, 330.

. Zelle, Hitlers zweifelnde Elite, 330; Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 712.

O N S EPTEMBER 1, 1939, German planes appeared over the central Polish city of Wielu. Their bomb bays opened. The synagogue, church, hospital, and houses below exploded. Horrified residents streamed out of the city. They found little respite: Stuka dive-bombers, which would terrify civilians across Europe, strafed them. Bodies littered the roads. The operation was repeated in dozens of cities across the country.

As the bombers laid waste to Polands cities, 1.5 million German soldiers poured across its borders from the west, north, and south. While Germanys air force swept from the skies the few modern airplanes the Poles could muster, fast-moving German tanks burst through Polish positions, surrounded them, and destroyed them.

During and after the campaign, Wehrmacht tactics were uncompromisingly brutal. Over the course of a three-week campaign, German forces As Polish towns and Polish divisions fell, German soldiers murdered thousands of prisoners of war, male civilians, women, and children.

As awful as their techniques were, Wehrmacht officers might have been able to justify them as tactical: any form of actual or potential resistance was crushed with the aim of subjugating Poland to German authority. The burning of villages, the shooting of prisoners, and the murder of civilians are hardly uncommon in the history of warfare, even if the German combination of new technology with old martial methods led to a far greater loss of life.

The executions were primarily carried out by the SS units that participated in Polands occupation: the Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei (special task forces of the Security Police, or Sipo, but, in reality, death squads). Organizationally, the SS, led by Heinrich Himmler and Hitler himself, was divided into the Party Secret Service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD) and the Secret Police (Geheime Staatspolizei, or Gestapo), which together made up the broadly investigative and policing wings of state security. The apparatus also included the Criminal Police (Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo) and the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei, or Orpo); the latter included police services such as fire, water, and air protection, among others. The SS also had military (Waffen-SS) and paramilitary wings; it was under the latter that the Orpos police battalions murdered massive numbers of civilians. The Orpo also supplied five hundred men to the Einsatzgruppen.

Men from the Gestapo, the SD, and the Kripo were formed into five Einsatzgruppen, and one was attached to each of the invading armies. The targets of these Einsatzgruppen were Polish nationalists, intellectuals, Roman Catholic clergy, and, of course, Jews.