Otto Skorzeny, once nicknamed “the most dangerous man in Europe”

The title of my blog post today comes from the words in a comment by one of the regular readers of my blog.

The words in a comment by Tim are quoted below:

Begin quote

I got a question(actually two questions) It’s off the subject . Anybody that knows of this,feel free to jump in. Otto Skorzen. He was one of hitlers most favored ss men. Heard he went to work for the Mossad. It said he told Wiesenthal he’d go to work for them,if Wiesenthal tore up the arrest warrant he had on him for war crimes . I don’t know what his “crimes” were,but if the hebs put out the arrest warrant,I’m guessing it had something to do with the holo. He was put on trial at the end of WW2 ,by the Americans,for something unrelated to the holo. He became a contract killer for mossad. I don’t care if you’re a hired gun for mossad or you worked at one of the units in the nazi prison system . Murder is murder. Yet this guy is handed a “get out of jail free card”,because he becomes a killer for Israel .So what’s up here ? You’re going to be arrested for crimes involving the holo,but if take out marked people for Israel,they’ll turn a blind eye to your past transgressions ? I’m beginning to think they weren’t to overly concerned with getting justice for the Jews . How many other nazis did the Jews let skate,because they went to work for them? I know Israel had their own hit people. What. Did they feel like God having a former ss man under their thumb. They pull shit like this,don’t bang on my door looking to borrow a cup of sympathy.

End of Comment by Tim

Otto Skorzeny

I have written at length about Skorzeny on my website. The words below are from my website:

In another Dachau [trial] proceeding, which began in August 1947, Lt. Col. Otto Skorzeny and nine others were charged as war criminals for the illegal use of US Army uniforms and with killing more than 100 Prisoners of War during the Battle of the Bulge. Lt. Col. Rosenfeld was also the law member of the panel of judges in this proceeding, but this time he allowed defense testimony that US troops had worn German uniforms in combat during World War II in similar efforts to confuse the enemy.

An affidavit from the Malmedy Massacre proceeding was introduced by the prosecution in the Skorzeny case, and when the defense protested, Lt. Col. Rosenfeld dropped the charges of killing POWs. There were no corroborating witnesses for the killings, and Rosenfeld ruled that the case could not be tried on affidavits alone.

This was an important ruling because in all the war crimes military tribunals conducted in Germany after World War II, witnesses were not required to appear in person and affidavits were allowed to be entered, so that the defense had no opportunity to cross-examine the person who signed the affidavit.

Otto Skorzeni

Otto Skorzeny, shown in the photo above, was acquitted after the presiding judge allowed testimony that the American military had committed the same crime of wearing enemy uniforms during the Battle of the Bulge. Although he was acquitted, Skorzeny was still held in prison after the verdict; he finally escaped and fled to South America.

In the first few days of the Battle of the Bulge, there was mass confusion caused by a team of 28 Germans dressed in American uniforms, led by the famous commando Otto Skorzeny. Riding in stolen American jeeps, they created havoc by directing American troops down the wrong road, changing signposts and cutting telephone wires to General Bradley’s field headquarters. Four of the team were captured and when they confessed their mission, the American army immediately broadcast the news that there were thousands of Germans operating behind enemy lines. Skorzeny and his men were later brought before the American military tribunal at Dachau in another proceeding.

Although there was an automatic review process in which American military personnel reviewed all the Dachau proceedings, there was no appeal process for war crimes verdicts handed down by the American military court. This did not seem fair to Everett, who was a southern gentleman from a prominent family in Atlanta, GA. Everett prepared a 228-page analysis of the pre-trial interrogations and the trial, which he sent to the officers who would be conducting the automatic review of the case. This report included the accusations against the prosecution interrogators.

When 12 of the death sentences were upheld by the review board, including that of Col. Jochen Peiper, Everett decided to petition the US Supreme Court for a writ of habeas corpus on the grounds that the 73 accused were being illegally held in Landsberg prison after being convicted as a result of “illegal and fraudulently procured confessions.”

When the news of Everett’s charges, that the Malmedy Massacre accused had been forced to sign confessions, was leaked to the media, the American public was outraged. World War II was “the Good War” in which Americans fought for their democratic ideals and their freedom. The Malmedy Massacre case had made a mockery of the rights of the accused to a fair trial. This was not the American way. American soldiers had fought and died to preserve this freedom.

When the case came to the attention of Secretary of the Army Kenneth C. Royall, he ordered a stay of execution for the 12 men who were scheduled to be hanged in just a few days, and then directed General Lucius D. Clay, the highest authority of the American occupation in Germany to investigate Everett’s charges against the prosecution. Not satisfied with that, Royall then appointed a three-man commission, headed by Judge Gordon Simpson of the Texas Supreme Court, to investigate not only the Malmedy Massacre case, but other Dachau proceedings, which had involved the same Jewish interrogators. The other two members of the commission were Judge Edward L. Van Roden and Lt. Col. Charles Lawrence, Jr.

After a six-week investigation conducted from an office which they set up in Munich, the Simpson Commission made its recommendation to Royall. The Commission had looked at 65 mass trials of German war criminals in which 139 death sentences had been handed down. By that time, 152 German war criminals tried at Dachau had already been executed.

The 139 men who were still awaiting execution were staff members of the Dachau concentration camp, SS soldiers accused of shooting POWs at Malmedy and German civilians accused of killing Allied pilots who were shot down on bombing missions over Germany. On January 6, 1949, they recommended that 29 of these death sentences, including the 12 death sentences in the Malmedy Massacre case, be commuted to life in prison.

In February 1949, an article entitled “American Atrocities in Germany,” which was allegedly written by Judge Van Roden, was published in The Progressive. In his article, Van Roden wrote as follows:

American investigators at the U. S. Court in Dachau, Germany, used the following methods to obtain confessions: Beatings and brutal kickings. Knocking out teeth and breaking jaws. Mock trials. Solitary confinement. Posturing as priests. Very limited rations. Spiritual deprivation. Promises of acquittal. Complaints concerning these third degree methods were received by Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall last Spring (1948).

The statements which were admitted as evidence were obtained from men who had first been kept in solitary confinement for three, four, and, five months. They were confined between four walls, with no windows, and no opportunity of exercise. Two meals a day were shoved in to them through a slot in the door. They were not allowed to talk to anyone. They had no communication with their families or any minister or priest during that time.

This solitary confinement proved sufficient in itself in some cases to persuade the Germans to sign prepared statements. These statements not only involved the signer, but often would involve other defendants. Our investigators would put a black hood over the accused’s head and then punch him in the face with brass knuckles, kick him, and beat him with rubber hose. Many of the German defendants had teeth knocked out. Some had their jaws broken.

All but two of the Germans, in the 139 cases we investigated, had been kicked in the testicles beyond repair. This was Standard Operating Procedure with American investigators. Perl admitted use of mock trials and persuasive methods including violence and said the court was free to decide the weight to be attached to evidence thus received. But it all went in.

Read more at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/DachauTrials/MalmedyMassacre04.html

Eugen Kogon and his famous book entitled “Der SS-Staat”

The subject of Eugen Kogon, and his famous book entitled Der SS-Staat has come up in the comments section of my blog, so I am going to tell you what I know about him.

Eugen Kogon testified at the trial of the Buchenwald SS men in the Dachau trials

One of the most famous inmates of Buchenwald was 43-year-old Dr. Eugen Kogon, an Austrian Social Democrat and political activist, who was a prisoner in the Buchenwald camp from September 1939 to April 1945.

Kogon was the main contributor to The Buchenwald Report, a 400-page book about the Buchenwald camp which was put together in only four weeks by the US Army, after conducting interviews with over 100 former prisoners at the camp.

Kogon later wrote a book entitled The Theory and Practice of Hell, which was a rewrite of the Buchenwald Report and one of the first books about the alleged Nazi atrocities in the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Kogon testified during the proceedings in the Dachau Trials about the harsh treatment suffered by the prisoners at Buchenwald, although he was one of the privileged political prisoners who actually ran the camp.

Kogon’s testimony was contradicted by Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen, who was the main witness for the defense in the Buchenwald case. Morgen also testified at the Nuremberg IMT in August 1946, before the Buchenwald case came to trial at Dachau.

At Nuremberg, Morgen testified on 7 August 1946 regarding the conditions at Buchenwald. In response to questions from the prosecutor at Nuremberg, Morgen answered as follows:

Q. Did you gain the impression, and at what time, that the concentration camps were places for the extermination of human beings?

A. I did not gain this impression. A concentration camp is not a place for the extermination of human beings. I must say that my first visit to a concentration camp, namely Weimar-Buchenwald, was a great surprise to me. The camp was on wooded heights, with a wonderful view. The installations were clean and freshly painted. There were grass and flowers. The prisoners were healthy, normally fed, sun-tanned, working…

THE PRESIDENT of the Tribunal: When are you speaking of? When are you speaking of?

A. I am speaking of the beginning of my investigations in July, 1943.

Q. What crimes – you may continue – please, be more brief.

A. The installations of the camp were in good order, especially the hospital. The camp authorities, under the Commandant Pister, aimed at providing the prisoners with an existence worthy of human beings.

They had regular mail service. They had a large camp library, even with foreign books. They had variety shows, motion pictures, sporting events. They even had a brothel. Nearly all the other concentration camps were similar to Buchenwald.

THE PRESIDENT: What was it they even had?

A. A brothel.

“the Wereth 11” get new honors, as German SS soldiers in WW2 are accused of “what was undeniably a war crime”

Update July 21, 2014:   The War Heroes TV channel (formerly the Military Channel) had a story today about the Wereth 11, the black heroes, who were tortured and killed by German soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge.

Continue reading my original post:

A reader of my blog recently mentioned “the Wereth 11” in a comment. I had never heard of “the Wereth 11,” so I had to look it up on the Internet.  I discovered that “the Wereth 11” was a group of 11 African American soldiers who were fighting in the Battle of the Bulge during World War II. After deserting from the battlefield, they had walked 10 miles to Wereth, a hamlet in Belgium, where they hid out, safe from the worst battle of World War II. You can read their story at http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/11/07/wereth-black-soldiers-battle-of-bulge-army-world-war-ii-history/3465059/

The Wereth 11 now has a Facebook page, where you can read all about these heroes who were gunned down by German soldiers in wartime.  There is also a resolution that has been introduced into the US Congress (H. Con. Res. 68) to recognize the service and sacrifice of these 11 American soldiers.  You can read about it here.

The hamlet of Wereth in Belgium (Click to enlarge)

This website gives the story from the point of view of the African-American soldiers:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/11/07/wereth-black-soldiers-battle-of-bulge-army-world-war-ii-history/3465059/

This is the story, as told by a former African-American soldier:

The unit was decimated. “We were all either killed or captured,” said George Shomo, 92, a veteran of the 333rd who lives in Tinton Falls, N.J.

Eleven members of the 333rd managed to escape. For hours, they trudged through waist-deep snow, staying away from roads and hoping to avoid German patrols. They carried only two weapons.

Exhausted and hungry, the men stumbled upon the tiny Belgian farming hamlet of Wereth shortly before dusk. They were waving a white flag, recalls Tina Heinrichs-Langer, who at the time was 17 years old.

Tina’s father, Mathias Langer, didn’t hesitate to offer help. He invited the men into his home, seating them at the family’s rustic kitchen table, where he gave the grateful soldiers hot coffee and bread.

Harboring the Americans was a risky move for the Langer family. Wereth was a town of divided loyalties. It had been part of Germany before World War I, and some of its residents still identified themselves as German.

But Mathias Langer was unwavering in his support of the Allies. He hid deserters from the German army and sent his own sons away to avoid having them conscripted.

There is a recent documentary film about “the Wereth 11,” which you can read about here.

This quote is from the link above:

Titled The Wereth Eleven, and of course based on a true story, it’s described as…

… an epic docudrama… that retraces the steps of the 11 soldiers of the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion who escaped The 18th Volksgrenadiers after their unit was overrun at the start of the Battle of the Bulge. Their 10-mile trek from their battery position to Wereth, Belgium led them to refuge with a Belgian family until a Nazi sympathizer revealed their presence to an SS Reconn Patrol. The soldiers surrendered, but were taken to a field, where they were tortured, maimed, and shot on Dec. 17, 1944. The killings were investigated, but never prosecuted.

Wait a minute!  German soldiers “tortured, maimed and shot” African American soldiers, but these German soldiers were “never prosecuted.” Unmöglich!

I quickly got out my copy of the book entitled Justice at Dachau by Joshua M. Greene.  This book tells all about the war crimes trials that were held at Dachau, by the Americans after World War II.  The “Wereth 11” was not mentioned in this comprehensive book, probably because no one was ever prosecuted for this crime.

A few years ago, I spent a great deal of time studying the war crimes trials at Dachau, and wrote about it on my scrapbookpages.com website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/DachauTrials/MalmedyMassacre03.html

It is very strange, and highly suspicious, that no one was ever put on trial for the torture, maiming and shooting of the “Wereth 11” in Belgium.  These black soldiers had deserted from the Battle of the Bulge and had gone 10 miles from the battlefield to hide in the hamlet of Wereth in Begium. They should have been taken as Prisoners of War by the Germans and given all their rights under the Geneva Convention.

This quote is from my website page about the Malmady Massacre:

Forty-two of the accused [at the Malmedy Massacre trial] were sentenced to death by hanging, including Col. Joaquin Peiper. Peiper made a request through his defense attorney that he and his men be shot by a firing squad, the traditional soldier’s execution. His request was denied. General Sepp Dietrich was sentenced to life in prison along with 21 others. The rest of the accused were sentenced to prison terms of 10, 15 or 20 years.

None of the convicted SS soldiers were ever executed and by 1956, all of them had been released from prison. All of the death sentences had been commuted to life in prison. As it turned out, the Malmedy Massacre proceedings at Dachau, which were intended to show the world that the Waffen-SS soldiers were a bunch of heartless killers, became instead a controversial case which dragged on for over ten years and resulted in criticism of the American Occupation, the war crimes military tribunals, the Jewish prosecutors at Dachau and the whole American system of justice.

Before the last man convicted in the Dachau proceedings walked out of Landsberg prison as a free man, the aftermath of the case had involved the US Supreme Court, the International Court at the Hague, the US Congress, Dr. Johann Neuhäusler, a Bishop from Munich, who was a survivor of the Dachau concentration camp, and the government of the new Federal Republic of Germany. All of this was due to the efforts of the defense attorney, Lt. Col. Willis M. Everett.

[…]

The prosecution case hinged on the accusation that Adolf Hitler himself had given the order that no prisoners were to be taken during the Battle of the Bulge and that General Sepp Dietrich had passed down this order to the commanding officers in his Sixth Panzer Army. This meant that there was a Nazi conspiracy to kill American prisoners of war and thus, all of the accused were guilty because they were participants in a “common plan” to break the rules of the Geneva Convention. Yet General Dietrich’s Sixth Panzer Army had taken thousands of other prisoners who were not shot. According to US Army figures, there was a total of 23,554 Americans captured during the Battle of the Bulge.

[…]

Patton’s Army was accused of several incidents in which German prisoners of war were shot, which he admitted in his autobiography. Patton wrote the following entry in his diary on 4 January 1945:

“The Eleventh Armored is very green and took unnecessary losses to no effect. There were also some unfortunate incidents in the shooting of prisoners. I hope we can conceal this.”

In another incident involving the shooting of German and Italian Prisoners of War, an American captain was acquitted on the grounds that he had been following the orders of General Patton, who had discouraged American troops from taking prisoners during the landing of the US Seventh Army in Sicily.

Ironically, an incident in which Americans executed German prisoners happened within half a mile of the Dachau courtroom. On April 29, 1945, the day that the SS surrendered the camp at Dachau, American soldiers of the 45th Thunderbird Division of the US Seventh Army lined up surrendered Waffen-SS soldiers against a wall and machine-gunned them down in the SS Training Camp, next to the concentration camp. This was followed by a second incident, on the same day, which happened at a spot very near the courtroom: the killing of SS guards at the Dachau concentration camp after they came down from their guard tower and surrendered with their hands in the air.

A third execution of German soldiers who had surrendered on April 29th, known as the Webling Incident happened in the village of Webling on the outskirts of of the town of Dachau. American soldiers of the 222nd Regiment of the 42nd Rainbow Division executed soldiers of the German Home Guard after they had surrendered. The Home Guard consisted of young boys and old men who were forced into service in the last desperate days of the war to defend their cities and towns.

[…]

After the war, the Germans attempted to bring a list of 369 murder cases, involving US Army soldiers killing German POWs and wounded men, before a German court, but the cases were thrown out. The list of these 369 killings was published in a German newspaper.

So who was really killing Prisoners of War in World War II?

 

It is “disgusting that the camp guards were allowed to live at all”

The title of my blog post today is a quote from a comment on a previous post on my blog on July 25, 2013. This quote is from the comment:

“I think its disgusting that the camp guaards were allowed to live at all.  Anyone who commits such attrocities deserves to be brutally murdered (and screw the ‘human rights’ that supposedly incorporates them)

This comment might pertain to the Dachau concentration camp, or maybe it was in reference to all the concentration camps, operated by the Germans.  Surely, the comment was not meant to refer to the guards at the internment camps in America where German-Americans and Japanese-Americans were incarcerated in violation of the 4th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The United States participated in war crimes trials in Europe under three jurisdictions: the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the U.S. Military Tribunals at Nuremberg, and the U.S. Army courts at Dachau. The authority for the proceedings of all three jurisdictions derived from the Moscow Declaration, called the Declaration of German Atrocities, which was released on November 1, 1943. This declaration, which was made long before many of the war crimes were committed, expressed the Allied plan to arrest and bring to justice Axis war criminals.

In other words, the Allies were determined to put the Germans on trial, even before any war crimes were committed.

Apparently, the person who wrote the comment about the guards being allowed to live, is not familiar with the proceedings of the American Military Tribunal held at Dachau after the war.  The first trial, conducted by the AMT, was the trial of the acting Commandant of Dachau and 39 others who were on the Dachau staff.

The 40 men, who were put on trial by the AMT, were not selected, out of the thousands of SS men who had worked at the camp, because their crimes were the most heinous. Rather, they were selected as a representative group because, included among them, were staff members from every category of personnel in the concentration camp. The purpose was to show that anyone connected with a Nazi concentration camp was guilty of a crime, regardless of his personal behavior.

Rudolf Heinrich Suttrop was put on trial by the American Military Tribunal

Rudolf Heinrich Suttrop, shown in the photo above, was the adjutant to the acting Commandant of Dachau, Martin Gottfried Weiss. Suttrop was convicted and hanged, although there were no specific charges against him. His crime was that he was a low-level member of the staff of the Dachau Concentration camp, and as such, he had participated in the “common design” to commit crimes. This new law had not existed when Suttrop was on the staff at Dachau.

Altogether, there were 5 proceedings against groups of concentration camp staff members at the American Military Tribunal at Dachau. In the first four of those cases, 177 staff members of Dachau, Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Flossenbürg were charged, and all of the accused, without exception, were convicted by a panel of American military officers.

There were 97 death sentences handed down in the first four cases, and 54 of the guilty were sentenced to life in prison; the rest were sentenced to lengthy prison terms at hard labor. The prosecutor, who was responsible for this remarkable feat, was Lt. Col. William Denson, an aristocratic southern gentleman from Alabama. The 100% conviction rate was due to the fact that it was the concentration camp system that was on trial; there was literally no defense for the accused.

The first trial of the staff at Dachau was held in this building

The photo above shows the building where the trials conducted by the American Military Tribunal were held.  This building is located inside the former SS garrison at Dachau.

At the trial of the 40 men from the Dachau camp, the witnesses for the prosecution were former prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp who were given room and board and a payment of 1,000 Deutschmarks for their testimony, according to Joshua M. Greene, in his book Justice at Dachau. They were housed in the SS buildings on the former Avenue of the SS, which was named Tennessee Road by the Americans who were working on the trials.

John Barnett identifies U.S. Army photos taken at Dachau; Lt. Col. William Denson is standing on the right

The “Dachau trials” were not trials in the ordinary sense. The accused were considered to be guilty as charged, and the burden of proof was on them, not on the prosecution.

Lt. Paul Guth was the chief interrogator who was in charge of getting signed confessions from the accused before the proceedings began. Lt. Guth was a Jew who had emigrated to the United States from Vienna, Austria in 1941.

The charges against Martin Gottfried Weiss, et al were brought by The General Military Court, appointed by Par. 3, Special Order 304, Headquarters Third United States Army and Eastern Military District, dated 2 November 1945, to be held at Dachau, Germany, on, or about, November 15, 1945. Two charges of Violation of the Laws and Usages of War were brought against the defendants.

The first charge alleged that the Dachau accused “acting in pursuance of a common design to commit the acts hereinafter alleged, and as members of the staff of Dachau Concentration Camp and camps subsidiary thereto, did, at, or in the vicinity of DACHAU and LANDSBERG, Germany, between about 1 January 1942 and about 29 April 1945, willfully, deliberately and wrongfully encourage, aid, abet and participate in the subjection of civilian nationals of nations then at war with the then German Reich to cruelties and mistreatment, including killings, beatings, tortures, starvation, abuses and indignities, the exact names and numbers of such civilian nationals being unknown but aggregating many thousands who were then and there in the custody of the German Reich in exercise of belligerent control.”

The second charge was worded exactly the same as the first, except that it specified “members of the armed forces,” instead of civilians. Like the first charge, no names of victims or specific acts against members of the armed forces were listed.

Note that the charges included killings, beatings, tortures, starvation, abuses and indignities, but there was no specific charge of gassing, although a film of the Dachau gas chamber was shown on November 29, 1945 at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, two weeks after the Dachau proceedings began. It was not known whether any victims who might have been killed in the Dachau gas chamber were from Allied countries, so this charge was not included.

Crimes against German citizens, and others who were not civilians or military personnel in an Allied country, were not included; it was left up to the German courts to bring charges against the concentration camp staff members for crimes against victims from non-Allied countries. The charges included only Violations of the Laws and Usages of War and not Crimes against Humanity.

The charges against Martin Gottfried Weiss, and the 39 other members of the Dachau staff, were based on the theory that all of them had participated in a “common design” to run the concentration camp in a manner which had caused the prisoners great suffering, severe injury or death. The period of time covered by the charges was from January 1, 1942 until April 29, 1945. Although the camp had been in operation since March 22, 1933, this was roughly the period of time that the Dachau camp had been in existence while America was at war with Germany.

The basis for the prosecution of staff members of the Nazi concentration camps was that some of the inmates had been captured enemy soldiers who were Prisoners of War and consequently they should have been treated according to the rules of the Geneva Convention, including the Russian POWs, although the Soviet Union had not signed the Geneva Convention and had not followed it during the war. Other inmates in the Nazi camps were political prisoners, partisans, resistance fighters or insurgents from German-occupied countries; they were considered by the American prosecutors to be comparable to Prisoners of War although the 1929 Geneva Convention did not give insurgents the same rights as POWs. In fact, the resistance fighters in German-occupied countries had violated the rules of the 1929 Geneva Convention themselves by continuing to fight after their countries had surrendered.

The U.S. “war crimes” office at Dachau

According to Robert E. Conot, author of Justice at Nuremberg, the idea of bringing the German war criminals to justice was first voiced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on October 7, 1942, when he declared: “It is our intention that just and sure punishment shall be meted out to the ringleaders responsible for the organized murder of thousands of innocent persons in the commission of atrocities which have violated every tenet of the Christian faith.” Roosevelt was referring to atrocities committed in the concentration camps, beginning in 1933; most of the war crimes that were prosecuted by the American Military Tribunals at Dachau had not yet been committed.

The Declaration of St. James on January 13, 1942 announced British plans for war crimes trials even before the British BBC first broadcast the news of the gassing of the Jews in June 1942. On December 17, 1942, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told the House of Commons: “The German authorities are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people of Europe.”

On October 26, 1943, the United Nations War Crimes Commission, composed of 15 Allied nations, met in London to discuss the trials of the German war criminals which were already being planned. That same year, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin issued a joint statement, called the Moscow Declaration, in which they agreed to bring the German war criminals to justice.

The killing of civilians by the Allies in World War II…and the case of Rudolf Merkel

Rudolf Merkel was a 16-year-old German boy who was put on trial by the American Military Tribunal after World War II and sentenced to life in prison for hitting a downed American flyer with a stick.  I thought about this young boy when I read a comment on my blog, written by a German-American, who is justifiably angry about the war crimes committed by the Allies in World War II, particularly the bombing of German cities and the killing of civilians, even after the war had been won.

I am quoting the comment in full because this is important information that young people today are not taught in their Holocaust education classes:

Even if the holocaust hoax were true, the war crimes and mass atrocities committed by the US and Britain were far worse and far more cowardly than anything the Nazis are even accused of committing. The US and Britain murdered as many people as they possibly could—women, children, babies included—by deliberately r-o-a-s-t-i-n-g them to death with massive incendiary air attacks and firestorms (“strategic bombing” and “area bombing”), with incendiary bombs including napalm, and even with nuclear bombs. If the numbers murdered by the US and Britain did not exceed the mythical “six million” number, it was not for any lack of trying. The Americans and Brits turned entire cities into crematory ovens—for victims who were still alive. The magnitude of those horrors grew to biblical proportions just as the end of the war grew near and the dangers to the US and Britain diminished to nothing at all. Shame on the cowardly victors! Shame on America! Shame on Britain! And, lest anyone is still totally decieved, it was the British—with encouragement from the US—who began the deliberate mass murder of civilians with their attacks on Germany in 1940 as Patrick Buchanan has explained. It was the British who bombed Berlin five times in August and September of 1940 before Hitler responded, reluctantly as he explained on radio, with the first German air attack on any British city, London, on September 7, 1940. If the Nazis had murdered people with poison gas, that would have been humane by comparison to Anglo-American firebombing.. When the victors were no longer able to simply murder Germans or “Japs” because the war had ended—they were still able to spread the most outrageous lies about the Germans, and that continues to this day. Who is left to stop them? Who dares to even try

I wrote about the case of Rudolf Merkel on my website scrapbookpages.com.  This information is copied from my website:

Rudolf Merkel

Sixteen-year-old Rudolf Merkel was the youngest war criminal in the Dachau trials and, at 19, the youngest inmate of Landsberg prison. He was tried before the US military tribunal at Dachau in 1947, along with 14 other German civilians, for the murder of three American flyers whose planes were shot down in August 1944 in the vicinity of Gernsbach, a German village near the French border. All of the flyers had surrendered, and according to international law, should have been treated as Prisoners of War by the civilians who were at the scene. But these German villagers were seeking vengeance because American and British planes had been bombing civilian targets and killing innocent people. The British and American policy of deliberately bombing civilians was designed to destroy the morale of the German people and force them to surrender. An estimated 600,000 German civilians were killed in the Allied bombing and virtually every city in Germany suffered bomb damage.

In three separate incidents near Gernsbach in August 1944, a group of local men brutally beat a downed American flyer, then deliberately killed him, and buried the body in the local cemetery. Merkel was a 16-year-old farm boy at the time, and like all German boys his age, a member of the Hitler Youth. He was 6 months too young to be in the German Army, and all the others in the case were too old to fight on the battlefield. One of the downed pilots had parachuted to earth and landed on a hill near Merkel’s home in the village of Weisenbach. Merkel was one of three villagers who found the wounded pilot under a bush and started to carry him down the hill. They were interrupted by another villager, Adolf Eiermann, who ordered them to beat the pilot, later identified as Sgt. Robert A. McDonough. According to testimony at the trial, Merkel was urged by one of the participants, Hermann Krieg, to strike the flyer twice with a stick after the man was most likely already dead. For their crimes, Merkel was sentenced by the American military tribunal to hard labor at Landsberg prison for life, and Krieg received the death sentence.

In his final statement to the court, before the verdict was handed down, Merkel indicated that he had not known that he was participating in a “common design” to commit war crimes, the first charge in the Charge Sheet. As quoted by Joseph Halow in “Innocent at Dachau,” his statement was as follows:

“Yes. I must tell the High Court here that I didn’t know anything about the first charge as it is in the Charge Sheet. The first charge accuses me, but I must say that at that time I was only 16 years old and I didn’t know anything about that; I didn’t know what was being done, and later on, in order to prevent anything like that from happening, I carried the flyer down there; and I must mention here I never have had any previous conviction and my parents never had any, either. And I would like to say also, that we have a small farm at home. My mother and father live there alone with two small children, the house is broken down and everything has gone to the dogs, and I beg the High Court to pass a just verdict.”

When the Gernsbach case came up for review, three of the 14 convictions were overturned, and 2 of the death sentences were reduced, including Krieg’s sentence which was reduced to 10 years. The guilty verdict for Rudolf Merkel was upheld, but his sentence was reduced to 15 years at hard labor. In the opinion of the review counsel, the evidence against Merkel was sufficient to establish that “he participated in and acted in furtherance of the common design embraced in the particulars of Charge I.” However, the review counsel also said that “Notice should be taken of this accused’s tender years at the time he committed these offenses.”

Note the use of the word “accused,” rather than the usual term “defendant.” All the German war criminals were called “the accused” because they were presumed guilty and the burden of proof was upon them. Note also the use of the plural “offenses” although Merkel had only struck one of the flyers and was not even present when the other two were killed. Under the “common design” of the charges, all the accused were guilty in all three incidents because they were carrying out a common plan to deliberately kill downed American pilots. Nevertheless, because of his young age at the time of his crime, the review board considered his life sentence at hard labor to be too harsh.

Merkel hired a German lawyer and petitioned for clemency. The man who had urged Merkel to participate in beating the downed flyer, Hermann Krieg, had been originally sentenced to death by hanging, but the review board had reduced his sentence to 10 years in prison. For some inexplicable reason, the review board had ruled that Merkel’s punishment should be more severe than Krieg’s. Because of this, Merkel’s German lawyer asked for his client’s sentence to be further reduced.

According to court reporter Joseph Halow, in his book “Innocent at Dachau,” Merkel’s petition for clemency contained an accusation against Harry Thon, a Jewish interrogator for the Dachau trials. He quotes Merkel’s statement to the court as follows:

“During the interrogation on August 1946, the interrogator, allegedly Mr. THOM (sic), who spoke German well, laid a pistol on the table and said to me I could choose now; if I told the truth they would turn me loose, otherwise there would be the pistol. I understood this to mean that he would shoot me if I did not testify how he wanted me to. I kept stating what is true.”

Rudolf Merkel was finally released from Landsberg prison on September 18, 1951 after his sentence was commuted. He was 23 years old. Krieg was released 5 months later. Four of the other accused civilians in the Gernsbach downed flyers case were executed by hanging, including Adolf Eiermann, the instigator in the beating of McDonough. All the others were released from prison within ten years.

A mound of rubble that was covered over in the city of Berlin

Berlin, the capital city of Germany, was bombed 24 times between November 18, 1943 and March 1944, and sporadic hits continued until the city was captured by the Russian army in April, 1945. By that time, the city had been reduced to 98 million cubic yards of rubble.

Each of the bomb attacks on Berlin involved over 1,000 planes and the dropping of up to 2,000 tons of bombs. Half of the city’s bridges were destroyed and the underground railway tunnels were flooded. There was no gas, electricity or water in the central portion of the city. The pre-war population of 4.3 million had been reduced to 2.8 million, as people were forced to flee the city; some 1.5 million people became homeless when their homes were bombed.

One out of 7 of the buildings destroyed in Germany by the Allied bombing were in Berlin. Out of a total of 245,000 buildings in Berlin, 50,000 had been completely destroyed and 23,000 had been severely damaged; 80,000 residents of the city had been killed. Even the trees in the Tiergarten, a large park in the center of the city, had been killed in the Battle of Berlin. There were so many historic buildings destroyed that Berliners jokingly referred to the American and British air raids as Baedecker Bombing. Baedecker travel guide books were used by tourists to locate famous and historic buildings.

A mere 5 years earlier, after the conquest of France in 6 weeks time, Hitler had visited Paris and taken an early morning tour of the deserted streets to see the famous buildings of the capital city, which were all still intact. Hitler’s earliest ambition had been to be an architect, and he made sure that the beautiful buildings of Paris were not destroyed.

You can read more about the Dachau trials on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/DachauTrials/index.html