Birds of Prey. Philip W. Blood

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ