Even the pre-Nazi Reichswehr believed that partisans had to be combated with extreme force. A potential wildfire, so the logic ran, needed to be extinguished at the first spark. And although this approach proved ineffective, in some regions the German struggle to put down resistance movements led to an unprecedented spiral of violence. Before long the killing of hostages and innocent victims, and the razing of whole villages, was part of everyday routine. This did not differ dramatically from practices maintained in the Napoleonic Wars or World War I. What was new were the dimensions. The rigor with which German occupiers pursued alleged partisans was one reason that 60 percent of the casualties in World War II, an unprecedented proportion, were civilians. Distinctions between military combatants as legitimate targets of attack and civilian noncombatants, who should have been protected, basically dissolved.
The surveillance protocols offer a number of paradigm examples of how Wehrmacht soldiers viewed the war against partisans, and they show that German military leaders and their troops basically saw eye-to-eye. Drastic measures were justified by psychological deterrence:
GERICKE: In RUSSIA last year a small German detachment was sent to a village on some job or other. The village was in the area occupied by the Germans. The detachment was ambushed in the village and every man was killed. As a result a strafing party was sent out. There were fifty men in the village; forty-nine of them were shot and the fiftieth was hounded through the neighbourhood so that he should spread abroad what happens to the populations if a German soldier is attacked.141
Franz Kneipp and Eberhard Kehrle also related how German occupiers answered attacks with brutal forms of violence. They saw nothing unethical about this. On the contrary, they both felt that partisans deserved to die horrible deaths:
KNEIPP: There was a lot going on there. Oberst Hoppe…
KEHRLE: Hoppe is well known. He has a Knight’s Cross?
KNEIPP: Yes, he took SCHLÜSSELBERG. He issued the commands. “As you to us, we to you,” he said. They were supposed to confess who had hung Germans to death. Just a hint, and everything would be all right. None of them said even that they didn’t know anything. Then it was, “All men, exit to the left.” They were driven into the woods, and you heard brr, brr.142
KEHRLE: In the Caucasus, with the 1. GD [Mountain Division], when one of us had been killed, no lieutenant needed to give any orders. It was: pistols drawn, and women, children, everything they saw…
KNEIPP: With us, a group of partisans attacked a transport of wounded soldiers and killed them all. A half-an-hour later they were caught, near NOVGOROD. They were thrown in a sandpit, and it started from all sides with MGs and pistols.
KEHRLE: They should be killed slowly, not shot. The Cossacks were great at fighting partisans. I saw that in the Southern Division.143
Interestingly, Kehrle and Kneipp had diametrically opposed attitudes toward the military in general. Kehrle found the primitive life of the army “idiocy” and “absolute shit,” while for Kneipp it was a form of “education.”144 Yet despite that, and the inherent differences between a radio operator and an SS infantryman, they completely agreed on the methods needed to deal with partisan warfare.
