Tapping Hitler's Generals

BRUHN: I do believe that shootings and all sorts of things were carried out there on a large scale, and as a matter of fact KITTEL (PW) told me that. He was an eye-witness of it at LVOV and CRACOW when hundreds and thousands of people were shot; he knows it for a fact, but I didn’t know it. I’ve never spoken to an eye-witness of a thing like that. I’ve heard it, but it was impossible to establish the truth of things like that. KITTEL is on the list of criminals, and one must not forget that such people are subconsciously obsessed with the idea that they must go in the direction through thick and thin, because they’ll fall anyhow, whereas people like ourselves are much more conscious of the fact that we can go everywhere, wherever we like. Of course, they can stand us up against the wall, but then it would be judicial murder. But I asked KITTEL: ‘What did you do on that Sunday morning when the hundreds of people were shot near your house?’ Then he said: ‘Everyone knew about it.’[312] (Cf. SRGG 1086(C)). So in a certain sense he was implicated in it, and one must not forget–I believe ULLERSBERGER (PW) is also afraid of a similar fate, and MEYER (PW) will say to himself anyhow: ‘They will have their knife into me, because so-and-so many PW were shot by my “Division”.’ Those people know for a fact that they probably haven’t a chance of returning to their own country. So on the one hand it leads to complete agreement and cooperation with all these ideas expressed by GOEBBELS, or on the other hand it leads to personal rows like we have here. KITTEL described it to me like this: he had a house at some place or other, and then one Sunday morning he was woken from his beautiful sleep by intermittent rifle-fire. So he asked someone to go and see what was happening. After a time this fellow returned and reported to him that a few hundred Jews were assembled there and were just being shot. That was in the area south-east or south-west of RIGA. He experienced the same thing again at CRACOW. Then he said that soldiers were under his command who were off duty on Sunday morning and who were stationed in that village, had all gone there and watched it. Then they dug their graves and then they picked up the children by their hair and then simply killed them. The SS did that. The soldiers stood there, and besides that the Russian civilian population stood 200 m away and watched as they were killed there. He proved how vile the whole thing was by the fact that an out-and-out SS man who was employed on his staff later succumbed to a nervous breakdown and from that day onwards kept saying that he couldn’t carry on any longer, it was impossible; he was a doctor. He couldn’t get over it. That was his first experience of such things actually being done. A cold shudder ran through SCHAEFFER (PW) and me when we heard that, and then we said to KITTEL: ‘What did you do then? You were lying in bed and heard that, and it was only a few hundred metres away from your house. Then surely you must have reported that to your GOC. Surely something was bound to be done about it?’ He replied that it was generally known and was quite usual. Then sometimes he also interspersed remarks such as: ‘There wasn’t anything particularly bad about it either,’ and ‘they were to blame for everything anyhow,’ so that I almost assumed at that time, that it hadn’t even mattered very much to him personally.

SCHLIEBEN: We are doomed to bloodshed.

BRUHN: It’s simply like this, that if we, as decent people were asked today: ‘What should be done to a government like that, what should become of a people like that which has carried out such things on a large scale?’, one can surely only say that for the sake of humanity a people like that should not win the war, but should be pushed back to its frontiers. In that way one becomes an accuser of one’s own country.

SCHLIEBEN: This is the situation into which those people have brought us. And then he (GOEBBELS) quotes the Almighty!

BRUHN: GOEBBELS drags up all sorts of things which he has no right at all to say. This is the scourge of God which is now overtaken humanity. That’s what happens if you look upon life solely for eating and drinking.

SCHLIEBEN: Such a thing does exist and it is coming too! ‘And I will visit the sins of the fathers upon the third and fourth generation!’

BRUHN: For the same reason I believe that when the policy of extermination overtakes us, which we have actually merited by our shedding of blood, the blood of our children will have to be shed too, or perhaps that of our relations.

Document 127

CSDIC (UK), GRGG 270

Report on information obtained from Senior Officers (PW) on 9 Mar. 45 [TNA, WO 208/4177]