We don’t want to be emotional anti-Semites who seek to create a mood for pogroms. Rather, we are driven by a pitiless and fierce determination to attack the evil at its roots and to exterminate it root and branch. Every means is justified to reach our goal, even if it means we must make a pact with the devil. (Herf, The Jewish Enemy, The Belknap Press, 2006, p.3).

Who Should Die — Germans or Jews?

Here a modest point may be permitted: There are about 20 million Jews in the world.
How would it be if one wanted to treat 20 million Jews according to the proposal of their racial comrade Kaufman rather than 80 million Germans? Then peace would certainly be assured. For the Jew is the troublemaker, the warmonger, everywhere in the world.

The Jews wanted war, and now they have it. But the Führer’s prophecy of 30 January 1939 to the German Reichstag is also being fulfilled: If international finance Jewry should succeed in plunging the world into war once again, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the world and thereby the victory of the Jews, but rather the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe.

We are seeing the fulfillment of the prophecy. The Jews are receiving a penalty that is certainly hard, but more than deserved. World Jewry erred in adding up the forces available to it for this war, and now is gradually experiencing the destructon that it planned for us, and would have carried out without a second thought if it had possessed the ability. It is perishing according its own law: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”

Together with the mass murder of Soviet prisoners-of-war during World War II, it was the most concentrated act of genocide in human history: "the dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust." (Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998], p. 3.) (Gérard Prunier provides an even higher estimate: "the daily killing rate was at least five times that of the Nazi death camps." Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide [Columbia University Press, 1995], p. 261.)

In mid-March 1942 some 75 to 80 per cent of all victims of the Holocaust were still alive, while 20 to 25 percent had perished. A mere eleven months later, in mid-February 1943, the percentages were exactly the reverse. At the core of the Holocaust was a short, intense wave of mass murder.

20 years ago the genocide in Rwanda claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. A group of German development aid volunteers experienced the murderous killing in their own house. Are they guilty? By Bernd Hauser

Europeans in northern Rwanda lead a good life, in a countryside made of cone-shaped hills. Corn, potatoes and beans are grown in well-cultivated fields going up the slopes. Barefooted men and women greet them in a friendly manner on the twisting paths. From huts spread over the hills come the sounds of everyday live, voices of women, cries of children, bleating of goats.

Project leader Thomas Magura, 36 years old, 31-year-old agrarian engineer Sabine Kramer, a student in practical training and a Belgian colleague are the team in a project of the Association for Technical Cooperation – Gesellschaft für technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) in Giciye. They help the peasants with improved seeds and show them how to lay out fields in terraces so that the soil is not swept away and the yield is higher. At the end of a working day they drink Belgian beer with their local colleagues and eat brochettes, spits with goal meat. After dark the development aid volunteers light the chimney in their house, for in the evening it gets cold at 2,000 meters above sea level.

Thus the Europeans in Giciye live until 6 April 1994. On this day an airplane crash in the Rwandan capital Kigali forces them into a situation with no way out, in which there is only one choice: between guilt and death.

On this evening the plane of Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana is shot down, probably by Tutsi rebels operating clandestinely in the capital. The incident unleashes a genocide, which over the next 100 days will claim up to 800.000 victims. The Hutu government's propaganda broadcasting stations mobilize the whole country overnight. "Do your work, finish off the cockroaches", the speakers say. In all villages throughout the country in a state of civil war the Hutu have organized themselves in paramilitary groups. The young militiamen of Interahamwe, which translates as "Those who attack together", understand the message from the radio: they are to kill the members of the Tutsi minority.

The German volunteers don't know how big the hatred is

At 5:30 the next morning the phone rings at the development aid workers' place in Giciye. The caller is Christophe Bazivamo, a Rwandan, who together with Thomas Magura leads the project and is attending a training session in Kigali. Bazivamo's family lives in a house next to the Europeans. He wants to talk to his wife Eudosie. After a few seconds she hangs up and rushes back to the house to pack her things. Eudosie Bazivamo, a friendly, reserved teacher and mother of two small children, is afraid. She is a Tutsi, one of the few still in the region.

At 8:30 hours Thomas Magura reconnoiters the situation and drives to the GTZ bureaus in the village. He learns that on all overland roads in the country roadblocks have been set up – the way out of Giciye is thus blocked. For no one knows who is waiting there: regular and relatively disciplined soldiers? Or drunken youths of the Interahamwe? From Kigali Magura receives instructions not to run the risk of a trip. The development aid workers stock up on food at the local shop; they buy beer, cola, a sack of potatoes. Nevertheless Magura asks his workshop manager Gervais Ndagijimana to prepare the all-terrain vehicles for departure.

Like Christophe Bazivamo the workshop manager, who administers expensive spare parts and precious gasoline, is not from the region. Thereby the Europeans avoid corruption and coterie. In the village Ndagijimana, who is also a Tutsi, seems to be popular and integrated. In the evenings and on weekends he patiently repairs the villagers' mopeds. Yet the villagers see Ndagijimana as an intruder, who robs them of their benefits. In their eyes the well-paid jobs in the development project should be given to locals. The Rwandan out-of-towners are hated in town. The German volunteers don't know how big the hatred is. Rwandans hardly ever show their feelings. To do so is considered unwise.

"There are limits to how deeply one can penetrate a local society", says Thomas Magura. He is sitting in his office in Den Haag, where he lives today. He immediately agreed to a conversation about Giciye. His sonorous voice fills the room. He appears calm and steady. Sometimes he closes the eyes, as if this would help him to recall the details of 7 April 1994.

Around 10:30 hours Alois Nzabanita, also a worker in the GTZ project, takes the workshop manager on his motorbike to the GTZ house. Gervais Ndagijimana apologizes for being late; he barricaded his house in the morning in order to protect his wife and his two children. Magura suggests that he take his family to the GTZ house. Eudosie Bazivamo has already moved to the Germans' house, together with her children, her eight-year-old sister Marie, a nanny and seven suitcases.

The workshop manager goes back immediately to bring his family. But only minutes later he is back: "Ils ont déjà commencé à couper les têtes!", he cries. "They have begun to cut off people’s heads!" Alois Nzabanita has just paid with his life for the favor or taking him along on his motorbike.

Now the Europeans understand how serious the situation in the house is. "It may sound strange", says Sabine Kramer, "but in Africa one is still accorded respect if one it White. At first we thought that they would do nothing to us and we could protect the Rwandans." After the murder of his colleague Gervais Ndagijimana tries to get to his house on a secret path to save his family.

Around 11:30 hours the aid workers watch from the garden of their house as a crowd armed with lances, machetes and cudgels goes to the workshop manager's house. They hear the men jeering, like in a football stadium after a goal has been scored. A short time later Gervais comes running up the slope, reaches the GTZ house in a state of shock. His wife and his children have just been murdered.

The crowd down in the village gets into formation again and turns to the slope, up to the GTZ house. The Germans know one of the leaders: Poulain Hakizimungu is a former project worker. He was always very friendly to his superiors, until he was dismissed half a year before due to frauds. Magura goes outside. Hakizimungu shows him a hand grenade and says: "You have one hour to surrender all Tutsis. If you do nothing will happen to the Whites. Otherwise we will throw grenades through the windows."

"That was quite suspenseful", says Thomas Magura.

Thomas Magura has decided to face the unimaginable horror of that day with maximum detachment. Could such a situation arise anywhere in the world? "Yes, that is part of the human condition." Magura seeks to retain his composure. He speaks in an articulate manner, lectures like a teacher. He reports the facts like an outsider, about his feelings he doesn't speak. Was he afraid? Magura avoids the question. "You have to adapt to the situation and make the best if it", he says. "And that could only mean: gain time."

Via radio the German embassy has recommended to under no circumstances try to protect Rwandans. But the Europeans in the GTZ house have one hope: the gendarmerie in the provincial capital Gisenye. A GTZ colleague in Gisenye, alarmed via radio, tries to persuade the gendarmes to drive to Giciye, hoping that the public officials are still serving law and order.

If you go out, you help the others

Around 13 hours the first stones crash into the GTZ house's living room windows. Magura goes outside again. The leader of the mob makes a new offer: if workshop manager Gervais is handed over, they will spare the Whites, Eudosie Bazivamo and her children.

Can one even understand such a horrible suggestion? When from one hour to the next anarchy and madness are reigning, law and decency all of a sudden are valid no more and one is supposed to send a human being to his death – how does one endure that? "It was as tough as can be", Thomas Magura says today. "But it was clear to me that we had no negotiation margin. I was under such tension that I stood beside me all the time and watched myself: what will he do now? One simply functions."

Back in the house Magura presents the demand to the workshop manager. "If you go out, Gervais, you help the others", says Magura. The workshop manager doesn’t resist. He is in a state of shock.

Again Magura goes out and sets the murderers the condition that Gervais Ndagijimana will only leave the house if he may use a car. The condition is accepted. Magura places a car in front of the door, turns on the motor. In the house the workshop manager changes clothes, wraps a cloth around his head, hoping that the crowd will not immediately recognize him when he runs out the door. The Europeans give him money. Maybe he can buy his life if he makes it to the road block on the country road.

Then Gervais jumps into the all-terrain vehicle and races past the crowd by the yard towards the valley. Stones break the windows. Shortly thereafter: gunshots. The village policeman hits the car's tires; the workshop manager continues fleeing on foot to his store. Then the Europeans hear four, five explosions of hand grenades. They see from afar how men remove the store's roofline. Later they learn that the murderers cut the head off Gervais' corpse and threw it into a river.

"It was an inhuman, grotesque situation, which no one can understand", says Sabine Kramer today in her house in a University town in Hessen. "But we could not save Gervais. They wanted him; he was high up on their list." The negotiations, the possibility of escaping in a car, the new clothes for camouflage, the money: "That was all we could do." Kramer takes a gulp of mineral water. She drinks a lot during the conversation. "A diet", she says, lost in thought.

After Gervais' death, there is quiet in the GTZ house. The Germans feel almost relieved. The mob has gone back to the village. The aid workers talk little; they don't discuss whether they have acted correctly. Each of them seeks an occupation. Under no circumstances must they start thinking. "We couldn’t allow fear or panic. That would have made us weak", says Sabine Kramer. "It was a little like in a dangerous situation in a car: instinctively one reacts correctly, the heart-throb only comes later. Except that in our case seconds of danger became hours."

Sabine Kramer operates the radio. At some time she packs an emergency bag. She wants to be ready for an escape. The table is full of bowls with food. The cook Emmanuelle, a local Hutu, has since morning been frying potatoes, making salads and cooking vegetables. They eat. No one has any appetite, the aid workers eat in silence. Christophe Bazivamo's wife has barricaded herself in one of the dormitories, in death panic. There are still no news about whether the gendarmerie will come to their help.

Around 15 hours the mob is back. Even more men than before, reinforcements have arrived from the neighboring village Karago. The Europeans step outside the door. The young men are primed; they wave about knives and lances. Magura speaks to the leaders: "It was agreed that you would leave us alone if Gervais came out." No one cares about this anymore: "Now it’s the family’s turn!" The young men surround the Europeans, scream at them, threaten with hand grenades, try to take away the car keys from Sabine Kramer. Thomas Magura intevenes.

"Thomas, hand over the keys to the house, we cannot save them anymore", shouts Sabine Kramer. She is desperate. Together with the trainee and the Belgian colleague she gets into one of the vehicles. Magura does not enter. He fears that the car will be attacked if he also enters.

"The situation became more and more confusing. We had to hand over the keys to the house," Magura writes ten days later in a report to his superiors. The report is terse, written in a sober, scientific style. Today, 20 years later, he still talks in the same way about the incomprehensible. Rationality as a sheet anchor in a situation that can only be experienced as traumatic?

A part of the mob rushes into the house. The Bazivamo family is dragged out and murdered a few steps away from the house: Eudosie Bazivamo, two-year-old Alain, two-months-old Christian, Marie, Eudosie’s eight-year-old sister, and Jacqueline, the nanny.

What happens in Giciye is repeated on this day and on the 99 following days, thousands of times throughout the country. "Such a mass hysteria unleashes powers that one cannot imagine", says Thomas Magura in his Den Haag office. For the first time he changes his voice, he now speaks fast and loud. "Just imagine! You stand in these people's way and say: Gervais stays here! One could run this risk, and this is what I reproach myself about in the end, whether I really did all I could to also save the Bazivamo family. But to play the hero, say: 'Only over my dead body!', it would have been of no use ..." The last sentence ends in a murmur.

About an hour after the murder of Eudosie Bazivamo an all-terrain vehicle races onto the yard, with six gendarmes armed with automatic rifles. The young murderers flee to the bushes. When no shots are fired they leave their hiding place and withdraw making threatening gestures. Under the gendarmes' protection the Europeans can leave Giciye and go without harm through the roadblocks manned by drunken youths to the provincial city Gisenye. Some days later they are evacuated to Goma in the Congo, and from there they fly back to Europe.

"We wouldn’t have survived the night in Giciye", says Thomas Magura. "Christophe Bazivamo saved our lives. He knew the gendarmes personally, and only for this reason he was able to convince them via radio to come to our help."

Christophe Bazivamo is a man with a broad back and a hefty head. After the genocide he studied for four years in Göttingen. He has married again, the sister of his murdered wife Eudosie. "I long asked myself: why did the murderers do this to me? I had to accept that there is no real answer", says Bazivamo in his office in Kigali, in rusty German. "Only this one: the perpetrators were misguided. They were poor, uneducated and therefore easy to manipulate."

After returning from Göttingen Bazivamo, a Hutu, quickly advances to Minister of the Interior in the Tutsi-dominated government, where he is one of those in charge of the national reconciliation policy: officially there are no longer Hutu or Tutsi, only Rwandans, is the directive of the government around Paul Kagame. When in 2005 the murder of his family is on trial, Bazivamo stands as a witness before the court. The defendants he knows personally; one of them, a teacher and colleague of his wife Eudosie, he has even entertained to a meal in his house. Three thousand people come to the football field of Giciye, to see how the minister settles accounts with the murderers of his family. Many spectators expect his righteous rage. But what the crowd expects does not happen. The minister doesn't shatter his enemies. When one of the lynch mob's ring leaders describes how his family was killed, he cries.

A story of guilt and forgiveness

A minister who cries in public: in a land in which power has always rested on demonstrated strength and violence, Bazivamo's emotional outbreak is a revolution. The five defendants ask the minister for forgiveness. "I forgive", says Bazivamo. Only if the country overcomes hatred, he said, will it have a future.

Thomas Magura has after 1994 worked mainly in Latin America and Asia. Africa he long avoided, only five years after the genocide he went back there again. In Rwanda he was only one more time, to Giciye he didn't go anymore. Sabine Kramer, on the other hand, returned to Giciye already three quarters of a year after the murders. "I had to go there", she says. "In order to process what I had experienced." The fields were not tended; the GTZ house had been looted, the electricity cables torn off the walls. Sabine Kramer knew almost no one anymore. Almost all the Hutu had fled to the Congo, in fear of the Tutsi, who had been victorious in the civil war.

Thomas Magura wrote in his report: "In the end it is everyone for himself, and it depends on himself whether he masters the catastrophe or goes under." It sounds like a justification. "The report was for me like a cleansing thunderstorm", says Thomas Magura. His adult sons he has never told about these events, "at least not in detail."

Christophe Bazivamo and Thomas Magura met again three months after the murders in Göttingen, where Bazivamo started studying. It was their last meeting. "This unspoken thing: you could not prevent my family’s death. And it is a fact: I could not prevent it!"

"Thomas Magura did all that could be done", says Sabine Kramer. She has often met Bazivamo in Germany, talked again and again about Giciye. When she is in Rwanda on service, Bazivamo, who today is the vice-president of Paul Kagame’s party RPF, always has an appointment for her. "He never laid any blame whatsoever on us", says Sabine Kramer. She is silent, drinks some water. Then she says: "But possibly he also hears other voices inside himself."

The killings that took place in August 1944 in the first week of the Warsaw Rising in the suburbs of Wola and Ochota are equally hard to understand, especially since they were nearly a hundred times more extensive than Oradour. The suburbs in question, on the western side of the city, had no military importance. They were filled with a mixture of factories, public buildings, hospitals and low-cost housing. But they happened to be in the path of the SS Storm Group as it made its first drive from the German-controlled outskirts towards the insurgent-controlled centre. The two SS brigades concerned, those of Dirlewanger and Kaminski, can hardly have been surprised to be fired on. But their reaction was surprising. Instead of engaging the Home Army units that were harassing them, they turned their fury on civilian non-combatants. In an orgy lasting five or six days, every manner of atrocity was perpetrated. A large crowd of men and women was driven into a churchyard and machine-gunned. Householders were dragged into the street to be butchered with sabres and bayonets. Pregnant women were drawn and quartered. Hospitals were invaded, and patients were mown down in their beds. Doctors and nurses who pleaded for relief were mutilated. Children were chopped to pieces. Streets and houses flowing with blood were then set alight. The number of victims is put at a figure between 40,000 and 50,000. A crazed mêlée of German convicts and Russian turncoats had joined forces to murder the largest number of Poles in as many ways as possible. Dante’s Inferno contains no such scenes, and there is no convincing explanation for them.

Already on 4 August, however, the tide started turning. The calls for help by Frank, Fischer, Stahel and Army High Command 9 led to a strengthening of the Warsaw garrison. Besides individual troop detachments of Wehrmacht and police two larger units were ordered to Warsaw, which from now on were to strongly mark the course of the fighting. The first was the so-called Dirlewanger Regiment. It consisted of German criminals, poachers, professional criminals, SS-men serving suspended sentences. In its previous assignments behind the Eastern Front it had left a wide trail of blood. Now this infamous regiment was to pacify Warsaw; the policy applied in this respect, »to shoot all inhabitants«, exceeded even the guidelines for fighting partisans in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. The second special unit was a regiment of the »Storm Brigade«(Russkaja Osvoboditelnaja Narodnaja Armia) under Mieczyslaw Kamiński, which consisted of former Red Army soldiers and after several »operations« in Belorussia was ill-reputed even among the Germans. Before the revolt’s outbreak a settlement of RONA members and their families (about 20,000 to 30,000 people according to estimates) as »armed peasants« in the southern part of the General Government had been considered; however this idea had already been abandoned before 1 August. For Warsaw Kaminski’s brigade obviously received as special license for »plundering«, which even the Germans themselves were soon to regret. It should be added that the infamous RONA made up only a part of the »foreign« troops in the operation against Warsaw, which at times made up almost 50 per cent of the attackers under German command and instructions. Kaminski’s and Dirlewanger’s units were concentrated for attack together with other reinforcements to the south and west of Warsaw under the command of the Higher SS and Police Commander Wartheland, Gruppenführer Heinz Reinefahrt.

Since the 3rd of August the Wehrmacht used ground-attack planes against the insurgents. On the next and the following day the units ordered by Himmlers to Warsaw arrived, so that the number of German troops in and around Warsaw doubled in relation to what it had been on 1 August. Overall command was taken by SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach, »Chief of Bandit-fighting Units« since 1943, who immediately called his Warsaw mission a »heaven bound assignment« in his diary. It is uncertain whether he thereby meant only the military aspect of his assignment, as also for the Germans the fight for Warsaw was more than a mere military operation from the beginning. The planning officers in the General Government had already in 1940 considered the »necessity« to »downsize« the city, which as part of the future German settlement area was to be reduced to 100,000 inhabitants. In the course of the occupation this strategic-urbanizing approach, which was closely linked to the chimera of removing the Poles from their old state territory, was accompanied by the conviction of Warsaw’s particular importance as a centre of the resistance movement: »We have in this land one spot from which all calamity emanates: it is Warsaw«, stated Hans Frank in December 1943. »If we didn’t have Warsaw in the General Government, we wouldn’t have four fifths of the difficulties that we have to struggle with. Warsaw is and remains the trouble spot, the place from which all unrest is carried into this country.« Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler thought likewise. »When I heard the news about the revolt in Warsaw, I immediately went to the Führer«, he told in September 1944 to an interest listener’s circle of defense district commanders and school commanders. »I said: "My Führer, the time is inconvenient. From a historical point of view, however, it is a blessing that the Poles are doing this. The five, six weeks we will manage. But then Warsaw will have been wiped out - the capital, the head, the intelligence of this people of 16-17 million Poles, which has been blocking the east for us over 700 years and stood in our way time and again since the first battle of Tannenberg. Then the Polish problem will historically no longer be a big problem for our children and all who come after us, even already for ourselves."«

Von dem Bach later claimed that only after his arrival he had learned about Himmler’s or Hitler’s order, which he summarized as follows in 1946 during his interrogation by a Polish public prosecutor:
»1. All insurgents should be shot after capture, regardless of whether or not their combat actions complied with the Hague Convention.
2. The noncombatant part of the population was to be wiped out without exception.
3. The whole city was to be leveled to the ground, i.e. all houses, streets and all that was in the city was to be destroyed.«

Except for von dem Bach’s personal responsibility it is irrelevant when he learned about this order. What is important is that this order in fact existed, that it was carried out by several units, and that the taking of command by the »Chief of Bandit-fighting Units« after a few days led to this order being gradually ignored – for reasons still to be addressed.

Already on 4 August the Germans had again tried to establish the east-west link from the Poniatowski Bridge via the Aleje Jerozolimskie. On 5 august the German troops counterattacked, this time with a focus west and southwest of the city centre. Despite numerical superiority over the Kedyw - group in Wola and despite support by heavy weapons they only advanced a few hundred meters this day. The military consequences of the first German counterattack were thus insignificant. The results of the fighting on 5 August were the mountains of corpses that the »Reinefahrt Battle Group« left in Ochota and especially in Wola.

Already in the first days German troops had massively murdered AK-soldiers and civilians in Warsaw: on 1 August at least 135 persons, on 2 August about 600 persons in the Gestapo prison in Aleja Szucha alone, on 2 and 3 August several hundred in the whole city. In several cases civilians, as already mentioned, were driven in front of attacking soldiers or tanks as a living shield. The above-quoted order about the shooting of all those captured and the destruction of the city, however, brought a new quality, which exceeded the atrocities and crimes typical of the occupation. Throughout 5 August this order was carried out in Wola mainly by the Dirlewanger Brigade: civilians from children to old people were bumped off in mass executions without any reason, and the murderers didn’t even stop before hospitals. In Ochota the less systematic mass murder was accompanied by rapes and robbery committed by the RONA-people. Nevertheless Reinefahrt was not completely satisfied: in a telephone call with the supreme commander of 9th Army he stated that his troops were only advancing slowly; they had inflicted enemy casualties of »over 10,000 including those shot«, but still the question remained: »What shall I do with the civilians? I have less ammunition than prisoners.«

Reinefahrt might have been more satisfied if he had known that the actual number of victims was far higher; according to Polish estimates, which however also included the victims of the following days, between 30,000 and 40,000 civilians died in Wola; along the Wolska Street alone and in its surroundings 41 sites of mass executions were later reconstructed. For comparison: the Germans’ military opponent in the west, the Kedyw battle group, gave its own losses on 5 August as 20 dead and 40 wounded. On the evening of this day the just arrived von dem Bach ordered the mass shooting of women and children to be suspended. In the following days »only« men were to be shoot – an instruction that was ignored often enough, but probably saved von dem Bach’s head after the war: notwithstanding all other crimes in the fight against partisans he had in this, his largest operation »in the East« at least reduced the bloodbath by one dimension.

The massacre in Wola and Ochota on 5 August had far-reaching consequences for the revolt. Tens of thousands of inhabitants of the southern and western quarters fled to the parts of the city controlled by the AK. On the one hand this shifting of masses of people increased the food problems in the liberated part of the city. On the other hand it gave the revolt a new dimension: after it had become apparent that the Germans killed civilians just as they did captured AK soldiers, the revolt became a struggle for the life of the civilian population, and the AK troops became the protectors or women, children and old people from a murderous rabble. The solidarity effect between troops and civilians was to be exposed to numerous tests in the coming weeks, just like the social peace between various groups of civilians in an embattled city, in which life become more unbearable each day. As a rule, however, the civilian population’s existential dependence gave the leaders of the revolt an authority that they would never have had as commanders of a purely military operation. The inhabitants of Warsaw, the propaganda company of SS-Panzer Division »Wiking« reported »after sounding out a trek of evacuees«, had at first turned away from the badly prepared revolt »with great bitterness […]. But now that they had to see that the Germans were ruthlessly destroying life and property of the inhabitants and leveling all of Warsaw to the ground, regardless of who was guilty or innocent, the mood had completely changed.« Obviously appalled by this side effect of the German terror, General Stahel thereupon ordered, »that among the civilians led away from Warsaw there must immediately be spread a counterpropaganda, which opens the people’s eyes to the fact that not the Germans have brought the calamity over the city of Warsaw, but the insurgents themselves.« But for this it was now too late. Despite the strategic defeat of the attack, despite the lack of Soviet help, despite the revolt’s complete failure in Praga on the Vistula’s right bank, the fight now had to continue – the stakes no longer being a military or political success, but the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the liberated part of the city. And yet another dimension of that 5 August should be addressed here:

»The mass murder in Wola was not an air attack, but an atrocity against men, women and children in a non-fighting part of the city carried out eye in eye by those giving, passing on, tolerating or executing the orders«, was the comment made in 1964 by military historian Hanns von Krannhals, who researched this subject in detail. »Its senselessness within the scope of the fighting only increased the guilt of those responsible, who were present right on site. The boards, small wooden crosses and memorial stones on both sides of Wolska Street in Warsaw are the way of the cross of a passion from which there is no acquittal before history.«

The documents processed by Eastern Europe researcher Krannhals are currently being brooded over again by the Flensburg Public Prosecutor’s Office, with no success in sight. For their investigation procedure in 1958, in which the same files as now were available, Chief Prosecutor Biermann and his people needed five weeks. Then they closed the procedure. Three weeks later there were elections for the federal state’s parliament (Landtagswahl), and Reinefarth was elected.
This time the prosecutors have already been gnawing on the files for ten months. However, the now probable indictment is not to be expected for the time being, at least not before September of this year. On 23 September there will be elections for the new Landtag of Schleswig-Holstein. Probable top candidate of the Gesamtdeutsche Partei ("All German Party") in the Südtondern electoral ward: Heinz Reinefarth.

Whether soldier, SS-man, policemen or SD-man … they all saw to it that Poland’s metropolis, from which so many calamities had come to us Germans over the centuries, was finally removed as a source of danger … We defeated also this enemy and inflicted on it losses of about a quarter of a million people.

There were always some ill and frail people on the transports. Sometimes there were also wounded people amongst the arrivals because the transport escorts, SS members, police, Latvians, sometimes shot people during the journey. These ill, frail and wounded people were brought to the hospital by a special Arbeitskommando. […] I did this by shooting them in the neck with a 9-mm pistol. […] The number of people I shot after the transport arrived varied. Sometimes it was two or three but sometimes it was as many as twenty or perhaps even more. 

There were always some ill and frail persons on the transports. Sometimes there were also wounded people amongst the arrivals because the transport escorts, SS members, police, Latvians, sometimes shot people during the journey. These ill, frail and wounded people were brought to the Lazarett by a special Arbeitskommando. These people would be taken to the hospital area and stood or laid down at the edge of the grave. When no more ill or wounded were expected it was my job to shoot these people. I did this by shooting them in the neck with a 9-mm pistol. They then collapsed or fell to one side and were carried down into the grave by the two hospital work-Jews. The bodies were sprinkled with chlorinated lime. Later, on Wirth’s instructions, they were burnt in the grave itself.

The number of people I shot after the transport arrived varied. Sometimes it was two or three but sometimes it was as many as twenty or perhaps even more. There were men and women of all ages and there were also children.

When I am asked today how many people I killed this way, I can no longer say precisely.

Bei dem Angeklagten Lac. ergibt sich dies aus folgendem: Er hatte von vornherein gebeten, ihn nicht in Sobibor einzusetzen. Als ihm Strafkompanie oder KZ angedroht wurden, ging er doch dorthin und zwar aus Angst, verhielt sich dort aber nicht exzessiv und änderte seine innerlich ablehnende Einstellung im Zweifel auch nicht. Er tat seinen befohlenen Dienst so schlecht, dass er schliesslich als unbrauchbar weggeschickt wurde, remonstrierte bei Höfle anschliessend gegen eine weitere Dienstleistung in Treblinka und desertierte sogar noch, als er in dieses weitere Vernichtungslager abkommandiert wurde.

Es ist nicht feststellbar, dass Lac. als ein unterster Polizeidienstgrad mit seinen sehr primitiven geistigen Gaben irgendwelche anderen Möglichkeiten gehabt hätte oder gar hätte erkennen können und deshalb zumutbar versäumt hätte, sich seinem Einsatz in dem Vernichtungslager Sobibor anders zu entziehen. Personalmässig unterstand er vorher nicht Wirth, sondern der Gendarmerie, deren oberer Führer Globocnik war. Bei seinem Dienstvorgesetzten Drechsel hat er remonstriert. Weitere Bemühungen wären erfolglos gewesen, wie sein späterer Besuch bei Höfle zeigt. Der Lagerkommandant in Sobibor war für ihn hinsichtlich der Diensteinteilung zuständig, im übrigen unterstand er dort ebenfalls Wirth. Bei einem so ungemein primitiven Menschen, wie Lac., kann nicht gefordert werden, dass er die Hierarchie der personellen Zuständigkeiten und Möglichkeiten in Sobibor noch anderweit ausschöpfte, um dort wegzukommen. Dass er - ausser mangelndem Diensteifer und Trunksucht - in Sobibor nichts weiter unternommen hat, um abgelöst zu werden, indiziert daher nicht notwendig einen einverständlichen Eifer oder eine innere Gleichgültigkeit. Lac.s beschränkter Verstand sah nur die von ihm wahrgenommenen Möglichkeiten ausser der Desertion, die er später beging.

Translation:
In the defendant Lac.’s case this results from the following: he had from the beginning asked that he not be posted at Sobibor. When he was threatened with penal company or concentration camp he went there out of fear, but did not behave in an excessive manner, and there are also no indications that he changed his inwardly rejecting attitude. He did his ordered service so badly that he was eventually sent away as useless, thereafter protested to Höfle against further service at Treblinka, and even deserted when he was ordered to this other extermination camp.

It cannot be ascertained that Lac., as a low-ranking policeman with his primitive intellectual talents, would have had or even realized any other possibilities and therefore failed to reasonably elude service at Sobibór in another way. In personnel matters he had priorly been subordinated not to Wirth, but to the gendarmerie, whose highest-ranking commander was Globocnik. He protested to his superior Drechsel. Further efforts would have failed, as his later visit to Höfle shows. The camp commandant of Sobibór was competent as concerns his service; otherwise he was also subordinated to Wirth there. It cannot be demanded of a person as immensely primitive as Lac. that he should have further tapped the hierarchy of personal competences and possibilities at Sobibor to get away from there. Therefore, the fact that he – besides lack of zeal and drunkenness – did nothing at Sobibór to be relieved from there, does not necessarily indicate a compliant zeal or an inner indifference. Lac.’s limited intellect saw only the possibilities he used besides the desertion he later undertook. [De Mildt & Rueter, JUSTIZ UND NS-VERBRECHEN SAMMLUNG DEUTSCHER STRAFURTEILE WEGEN NATIONALSOZIALISTISCHER TÖTUNGSVERBRECHEN. Einzelausfertigung der Urteile des LG Hagen vom 20.12.1966, 11 Ks 1/64 und des BGH vom 25.03.1971, 4 StR 7-48/69, Ex-Post Facto Productions, 2001, p.228; translation kindly provided by Roberto Muehlenkamp]. 

In other words: Lachmann told the prosecutors exactly what they wanted to hear – and they had sufficient confidence in his mental capacity to use him as a witness. No doubt we may safely assume that the same situation applied a few years earlier, when Lachmann’s own freedom was at stake [Riposte, p.171].

Rebecca Wittmann, in her brief but sweeping overview of German Nazi prosecutions from 1960 to 1980, points to what she sees as a generational conflict between "young, and eager prosecutors and older, more conservative, largely former Nazi judiciary" (p. 211). In a context where the legislature failed to provide an adequate or clear statutory basis for prosecuting Nazi crimes (and indeed, with legislative reform concerning the statute of limitations in 1969, actually effected a de facto amnesty for many Nazi criminals), conservative judges triumphed over activist prosecutors. The result was a largely exculpatory jurisprudence in which only the most extreme and sadistic Nazi defendants faced anything like adequate punishment for their crimes.

This so-called subjective interpretation enabled the courts to convict as an accomplice someone who had personally killed. In the immediate postwar years, some courts still rejected this interpretation. They refused to classify Nazi killers as accomplices; they saw the "degree of personal interest" as only one criterion of how to judge participation. These courts convicted the killers as perpetrators.61 But eventually most courts accepted the subjective interpretation of the Bathtub Case.62 After 1948, this interpretation was applied more and more often to almost all Nazi criminals; thus commanders of Einsatzgruppen, senior officers of the extermination camps, and chiefs of the Gestapo were convicted as the accomplices of the senior perpetrators: Hitler, Goering, Himmler, and Heydrich. All this had become accepted practice long before the highest federal court, the Bundesgerichtshof, reaffirmed this interpretation in its 1962 Staschynski decision.63
 
Even conviction as an accomplice did not automatically prevent the imposition of a stiff sentence. A life sentence was permissible; a reduction from the mandatory sentence of perpetrator was only suggested- not required-for the accomplice. Even if the possible life sentence was not imposed, a fifteen-year prison term could be pronounced. This, however, was not the trend. The courts rarely imposed such heavy sentences. Usually only a few years, often less than five, were imposed as punishment for an accomplice in the murder of thousands. The reasons advanced to explain this leniency were often bizarre. For example, in one case a court ruled as follows:

In passing sentence, the Court considered as a mitigating circumstance that the defendant suffered protracted psychological stress because, fearful of unjust punishment and extradition to foreign powers, he concealed himself for years in his apartment.64

In 1968 a change in the law made conviction far more difficult. By that time, the statute of limitations had expired on all Nazi crimes except murder. Each time the statute of limitations threatened to expire on murder, the legislature extended it after long debates. But the statute does not mention murder or manslaughter. Instead, it defines murder as a crime punishable by life imprisonment and manslaughter as a crime punishable by fifteen years imprisonment. The statute of limitations on the latter expired in 1960. The former, which has not expired, applies to the perpetrator; it also applied to the accomplice, who seldom received a life sentence but who could have received it. In 1968, a change in §50 of the Penal Code made the reduction of sentence mandatory for the accomplice if he did not share the base motives of the perpetrator. Such a reduction to no more than fifteen years meant that the statute of limitations would have expired in 1960 for this kind of accomplice to murder.65

From start to finish, the process of gassing an animal takes about 25 minutes. One or more animals are placed in an airtight chamber, and a high concentration of bottled carbon monoxide gas is released.

Cats and dogs are rendered unconscious within a minute, then eventually die from lack of oxygen.

(Schenk hides his face in his hands).

“We blew up the doors, I think of a school. Children were standing in the hall and on the stairs. Lots of children. All with their small hands up. We looked at them for a few moments until Dirlewanger ran in. He ordered to kill them all. They shot them and then they were walking over their bodies and breaking their little heads with butt ends. Blood streamed down the stairs. There is a memorial plaque in that place stating that 350 children were killed. I think there were many more, maybe 500."

“Or that Polish woman" (Schenk doesn't remember which action it was). "Every time, when we stormed the cellars and women were inside the Dirlewanger soldiers raped them. Many times a group raped the same woman, quickly, still holding weapons in their hands. Then after one of the fights, I was standing shaking by the wall and couldn't calm my nerves. Dirlewanger soldiers burst in. One of them took a woman. She was pretty. She wasn't screaming. Then he was raping her, pushing her head strongly against the table, holding a bayonet in the other hand. First he cut open her blouse. Then one cut from stomach to throat. Blood gushed. Do you know, how fast blood congeals in August?"

“There is also that small child in Dirlewanger’s hands. He took it from a woman who was standing in the crowd in the street. He lifted the child high and then threw it into the fire. Then he shot the mother."

“Or that little girl who unexpectedly came out of the cellar. She was thin and short, something about 12 years old. Torn clothes, disheveled hair. On one side we, on the other Poles. She was standing by the wall not knowing where to run. She raised her hands, and said Nicht Partizan. I waved with my hand that she shouldn't be afraid and should come closer. She was walking with her little hands up. She was squeezing something in one of her hands. She was very close when I heard a shot. Her head bounced. A piece of bread fell out from her hand. In the evening the platoon leader, he was from Berlin, came up to me and said proudly: ‘It was a master shot. Wasn’t it?’ He smiled proudly."

"In fact, I am the author “most damaging” to their [Jean-Claude Pressac and Robert Jan Van Pelt] books about Auschwitz, which I exhaustively refuted in the more than 700 pages of my already quoted study Auschwitz: The Case for Sanity."

(Mattogno [with Graf and Kues], The “Extermination Camps” of “Aktion Reinhardt”, 2013, p. 1496)