The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [279]
The truth about what was happening to Poles, Russians and especially Jews was common currency in the ‘private’ conversations at Trent Park. In December 1944, to take one of any number of examples, Lieutenant-General Heinrich Kittel, the former commander of the 462nd Volksgrenadier Division, told Major-General Paul von Felbert, the former commandant of Feldkommandantur (military administration unit) 560: ‘The things I’ve experienced! In Latvia, near Dvinsk, there were mass executions of Jews carried out by the SS. There were about fifteen SS men and perhaps sixty Latvians, who are known to be the most brutal people in the world. I was lying in bed early one Sunday morning when I kept on hearing two salvoes followed by small arms fire.’ On investigating, Kittel found ‘men, women and children – they were counted off and stripped naked. The executioners first laid all the clothes in one pile. Then twenty women had to take up their position – naked – on the edge of the trench, they were shot and fell down into it.’ ‘How was it done?’ asked Felbert. ‘They faced the trench and then twenty Latvians came up behind and simply fired once through the back of their heads, and they fell down forwards into the trench like ninepins.’6
Kittel gave an order forbidding such executions ‘outside, where people can look on. If you shoot people in the wood or somewhere where no one can see,’ he told the SS, ‘that’s your own affair. But I absolutely forbid another day’s shooting here. We draw our drinking water from deep springs; we’re getting nothing but corpse water there.’ ‘What did they do to the children?’ asked Felbert. Kittel – who, the report states, sounded ‘very excited’ – answered: ‘They seized 3-year-old children by the hair, held them up and shot them with a pistol and then threw them in. I saw that for myself. One could watch it.’ Another general, Lieutenant-General Hans Schaefer, commander of the 244th Infantry Division, asked Kittel: ‘Did they weep? Have the people any idea what’s in store for them?’ ‘They know perfectly well,’ replied Kittel; ‘they are apathetic. I’m not sensitive myself, but such things turn my stomach.’ Later on, however, he mused: ‘If one were to destroy all the Jews of the world simultaneously there wouldn’t remain a single accuser,’ and ‘Those Jews are the pest of the east!’ ‘What happened to the young, pretty girls?’ asked Felbert when the conversation turned to the concentration camps. ‘Were they formed into a harem?’ ‘I didn’t bother about that,’ Kittel answered. ‘I only found that they did become more reasonable… The women question is a very shady chapter. You’ve no idea what mean and stupid things are done.’7 In another conversation later that same day, Kittel told Schaefer about Auschwitz: ‘In Upper Silesia they simply slaughtered the people systematically. They were gassed in a big hall. There’s the greatest secrecy about all those things.’ Later still he said: ‘I’m going to hold my tongue about what I do know of these things.’ He little suspected that his every word was in fact being recorded, transcribed and translated.
The following February, Major-General Johannes Bruhn, commander of the 533rd Volksgrenadier Division, discussed the Holocaust with Felbert, saying: ‘I must assume, after all I have read about the Führer, that he knew all about it.’ ‘Of course he knew all about it,’ replied Felbert. ‘He’s the man who is responsible. He even discussed it with Himmler.’ ‘Yes,’ said Bruhn, ‘that man doesn’t care a hoot if your relatives are annihilated.’ ‘That man doesn’t care a damn,’ agreed Felbert. They saw the Holocaust, therefore, primarily in terms of the retribution the Allies would visit on the Fatherland once it was uncovered. In March 1945 Bruhn, one of the very few generals to emerge with credit