Crimes of the Wehrmacht

I very insightful document that i have been reading and doing a lot of annotations on. Makes the point that the extermination could not have happened without the help of the Wehrmacht, the regular German military during World War II! Done by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. highly recommend to everyone.

http://www.verbrechen-der-wehrmacht.de/pdf/vdw_en.pdf

 

Yes, and the locals helped Germans for instance in the Baltic countries by bringing the Jews to them already as the Germans entered the towns, and other volunteers who shot Jews in the East in huge numbers instead of Germans. And was it Rumanians who killed the Jews in Odessa by themselves. Etc etc. But true, Wehrmacht was not innocent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romania_in_World_War_II

According to an international commission report released by the Romanian government in 2004, between 280,000 to 380,000 Jews in the territories of Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transnistria were systematically murdered by Antonescu's regime.[25] Of the 25,000 Romani deported, who were deported to concentration camps in Transnistria, 11,000 died.[26]
Though much of the killing was committed in the war zone by Romanian troops, there were also substantial persecutions behind the front line. During the Iaşi pogrom of June 1941, over 12,000 Jews were massacred or killed slowly in trains traveling back and forth across the countryside.
Half of the 320,000 Jews living in Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Dorohoi district in Romania were murdered within months of the entry of the country into the war during 1941. Even after the initial killings, Jews in Moldavia, Bukovina and Bessarabia were subject to frequent pogroms, and were concentrated into ghettos from which they were sent to Nazi concentration camps, including camps built and run by Romanians. The number of deaths in this area is not certain, but the lowest respectable estimates run to about 250,000 Jews and 25,000 Romani in these eastern regions, while 120,000 of Transylvania's 150,000 Jews died at the hands of the Germans later in the war.
Romanian soldiers also worked with the Einsatzkommandos, German killing squads, tasked with massacring Jews and Roma in conquered territories. Romanian troops were in large part responsible for the Odessa massacre, in which over 100,000 Jews were shot during the autumn of 1941.

 

so, did a high percentage of Wehrmacht units participate '''knowing'' there would be genocide/etc?? ['knowing' being the key term] ....a lot of W units did executions/murder.....but was it a significant percentage??

 

these are not even the totals of the entire genocide/murders/etc, correct?? look at these numbers!! that's why this is one of my most [ hate to put it this way ] interesting subjects

 

I think personally that the co-operation between einsatz and Wehrmacht was quite usual in the early war in the east, but the gas solution was taken later because the soldiers were noted to be quite stressed for killing civilians in massive numbers. Gathering them to the trains for the trip to the camps was much easier...

the Browning book is excellent reading on the subject:

http://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0060995068

 

ty..just requested it....

 

Another one on the practice of co-operation for the big war in the USSR I found this book quite good:

http://www.polishlibrary.org/review/hitler_strikes_poland.htm

http://www.amazon.com/Hitler-Strikes-Poland-Blitzkrieg-Ideology/dp/0700613927