display
Killing also has to be learned - ideally from scratch.
Few mass murderers are likely to have started killing as early as Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski.
When he was commissioned to put down the uprising of the Polish Home Army in Warsaw at the beginning of August 1944, his first confrontation with deadly violence was almost 30 years ago.
In December 1914, when he was not even 16, the boy from the impoverished Kashubian aristocracy signed up for the Prussian-German army.
At that time he was the youngest war volunteer in the imperial army and as such attracted some attention.
Half a year later, as a private in the 129th Infantry Regiment, 1st Battalion, 1st Company, he suffered a bullet through the shoulder - a "slight wound" according to the categories of war.
Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski (1899-1972) proudly wore the Knight's Cross that he had received for mass murder behind the Eastern Front
Source: Federal Archives / Image 183-S73507
Photo released under license CC-BY-SA 3.0
Erich von Zelewski, as he called himself at the time, remained at the front until the bitter end of 1918.
Yes, he even rose from being a common soldier to becoming a lieutenant - a remarkable career for someone not yet of full age (at that time usually at the age of 21), which was also awarded the Iron Cross, 2nd and 1st class.
display
He remained loyal to the military through the defeat in World War I - first as a free corps fighter, then as a regular member of the Reichswehr.
He called himself a "Kommisskopp" and "Landsknecht".
He didn't want to be anything else either.
But as a 25-year-old he had to leave the Reichswehr involuntarily in 1924 because of “National Socialist activities”.
Now he called himself von dem Bach-Zelewski, worked first as a laborer, then built a small taxi company in Berlin and bought a farm near Landsberg on the Warthe from the profits in 1928.
Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski as Higher SS and Police Leader in Minsk, probably in 1943
Source: Federal Archives / Image 101III-Weiss-047-31 / Weiss
Photo released under license CC-BY-SA 3.0
After leaving the Reichswehr, he apparently remained true to his political convictions.
In any case, he joined the NSDAP at the end of 1930 and a little later the SS. He quickly made a career, especially in the self-proclaimed party elite, but also won a Reichstag mandate for the NSDAP on July 31, 1932, which he did in the November election lost again, only to recapture it in the semi-free election on March 5, 1933.
display
During the phase in which the Hitler party came to power, from late February 1933 to mid-1934, von dem Bach-Zelewski proved himself to be a ruthless doer.
He ordered a total of five communists to be shot as "atonement" for a murdered SA man and a dead Hitler Youth - at least the SA man was not a victim of a political murder, but a family quarrel.
In the course of the alleged Röhm putsch at the end of June 1934, von dem Bach-Zelewski had his former colleague Anton von Hohberg and Buchwald killed.
He was one of only five victims of the purge who had belonged to the SS - against at least 48 SA members who had been murdered.
East Prussia Gauleiter Erich Koch had a falling out with Bach-Zelewski - but the two did not take anything in terms of atrocities
Source: picture-alliance / dpa
In the following year, von dem Bach-Zelewski, meanwhile SS chief of East Prussia, fell out with the NSDAP Gauleiter Erich Koch, who was almost unreservedly ruling there.
And lost: At the beginning of 1936, Hermann Göring decreed that the troublemaker, who had meanwhile been promoted to SS-Gruppenführer (equivalent to a lieutenant general in the Wehrmacht), had to disappear from East Prussia.
Heinrich Himmler transferred him to Silesia, with his office in Breslau.
display
With the beginning of the war he was responsible for the annexed East Upper Silesia.
In the meantime he only called himself von dem Bach;
He had given up his Polish-sounding, actually Kashubian, surname Zelewski.
On January 25, 1940, he reported to Berlin that “a camp would shortly be set up near Auschwitz, which was intended as a kind of state concentration camp”.
When an inmate of the concentration camp managed to escape almost six months later, von dem Bach ordered that all civilians who had helped him should be shot immediately.
It is not known how many victims this order caused.
Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, as he probably preferred to see himself: as a proud country gentleman in riding breeches
Source: Getty Images
From then on, the number of deaths for which the brook was responsible increases from month to month.
In April 1941 he was secretly appointed "Higher SS and Police Leader Russia-Center", that is to say, SS chief in the hinterland of Army Group Center.
He was at least partly responsible for tens of thousands of murders in Belarus and Ukraine.
In contrast to his boss Heinrich Himmler, von dem Bach showed no weaknesses when he himself followed mass shootings.
At least not right away.
In January 1942 he suffered a nervous breakdown and was transferred to the SS hospital in Hohenlychen north of Berlin.
Allegedly he was hallucinating and feeling guilty.
A version that you can believe, but you don't have to believe it.
After his recovery, von dem Bach took on a task at his own request that was even more brutal than his previous responsibilities: he was supposed to "fight gang mischief", that is, the Soviet partisans behind the German eastern front.
Propaganda photo of the SS for the Warsaw Uprising in 1944
Source: Federal Archives, Image 183-97906
Photo released under license CC-BY-SA 3.0
The changing police and SS units under his control were unprecedentedly brutal against the civilian population, because real partisans were rarely caught.
By now at the latest Erich von dem Bach was “Himmler's man for all cases”, as the historian Andrej Angrick aptly writes.
As such, on August 5, 1944, he was commissioned to end the uprising of the Polish Home Army in Warsaw as quickly as possible.
In the course of the terribly gruesome street and ruin fighting, up to 10,000 SS men and German police officers, around 15,000 Polish fighters - but above all 175,000 to 200,000 civilians.
There are no exact figures, because no proper death records were kept for natives during the occupation of Poland.
A fighter of the Polish Home Army AK (Armia Krajowa) during the street fighting in Warsaw
Source: dpa
display
Erich von dem Bach was not so loyal, however, that he did not worry about his fate after the foreseeable defeat of the Third Reich.
In a modification of the SS motto “My honor means loyalty”, a trial observer later attested to him that he had always acted according to the principle: “His honor means cunning”.
For example, at the end of August 1944, von dem Bach offered the Polish Home Army a joint fight against the Red Army, which watched the uprising from the other bank of the Vistula without intervening.
He also ensured that the leader of the Home Army, General Tadeusz Graf Komorowski, was allowed to surrender properly on October 4, 1944 and, like his direct subordinate Colonel Antoni Chrusciel, was treated as a prisoner of war.
Both survived and emigrated to the West after the Communist takeover in Warsaw.
Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski surrendered to Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski in Warsaw on October 4, 1944
Source: Wikimedia / Public Domain
After the German defeat in 1945, von dem Bach, who now again bore his Polish-sounding name, continued his strategy: He made himself available to the prosecutors of the Nuremberg Trial as a key witness.
That saved him extradition to the Soviet Union or Poland, where he would certainly have been sentenced to death.
Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski was initially only six and a half years in detention and three more years in house arrest before he was released in 1954.
Since he had not been prosecuted by the Allies for his mass murders in the Soviet Union and Poland, he could not be held accountable by the Federal Republican justice system for these crime complexes either - this was the unintended consequence of stipulating that West German courts should do the work of the Allied courts had to respect.
Only when a witness testified in 1958 for the murder of Anton von Hohberg and Buchwald in 1934 could von dem Bach-Zelewski be arrested again.
He was therefore given a further four and a half years and then a life sentence for the murder of at least five communists in 1933.
Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski was one of the Nazi criminals in West Germany who were sentenced to “life” and who were not released early.
For his crimes, he sat for a total of 20 years plus house arrest.
A week after his 73rd birthday in 1972, he died seriously ill of heart failure in Munich.
At the end of the uprising in early October 1944, Warsaw was a sea of ruins
Source: dpa
You can also find “World History” on Facebook.
We look forward to a like.
This article was first published in August 2019.